LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 





«# 1* 

Shelf JX-3 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 












THE SCOTTISH PULPIT 



FROM 



THE EEFORMATION 

TO 

THE PRESENT DAY 



/ 



WILLIAM M. TAYLOR, D.D., LL.D. 

MINISTER OP THE BROADWAY TABERNACLE, NEW YORK CITY 

AUTHOR OP "PETER THE APOSTLE" "ELIJAH THE PROPHET" 

"DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL" ETC 



ft 




NEW YORK 
HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE 

1887 



[THE LI1EAEYJ 
OF CONGEES* 

WASHINGTON] 



<5 



qf\ 



By THE REV. DR. WM. M. TAYLOR. 



DANIEL THE BELOVED. 
DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL. 
JOSEPH THE PRIME -MINISTER. 



PETER THE APOSTLE. 
MOSES THE LAW- GIVER. 
PAUL THE MISSIONARY. UPd. 



ELIJAH THE PROPHET. 
12mo, Cloth, $1 50 per volume. 



Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. 

HP%p Harper & Brothers will send any of the above works by mail, postage prepaid, to 
any part of the United States or Canada, on receipt of the price. 



Copyright, 1887, by Harper & Brothers. 



All rights reserved. 



TO 
THE MEMBERS OF THE FACULTY 

OF 

THE THEOLOGICAL DEPARTMENT 

OF 

YALE UNIVERSITY 
AND THE STUDENTS UNDER THEIR CARE 

Qilicoe £cttnxes 

DELIVERED AS THE LYMAN BEECHER COURSE FOR 18S6 

&re Elsbicatsb 

WITH HIGHEST REGARD BY 

THE AUTHOR 



PREFACE. 



The design of these sketches is neither to give a full 
account of Scottish Ecclesiastical History nor to furnish 
complete biographies of the men who have been promi- 
nent in the Scottish pulpit since the Reformation. My 
aim has simply been to put the preachers in the environ- 
ment of their times, to bring out the characteristics by 
which they were distinguished, and to give point to such 
lessons from their work as may be useful in our own age. 

The form in which the sketches are presented was de- 
termined by the fact that they were originally addressed 
to the students of Yale Theological Seminary in the spring 
of 1886, when I had the honor of holding, for the second 
time, the appointment of " Lyman Beecher Lecturer" in 
that institution. 

For reasons which are too obvious to need to be for- 
mally stated, I have not attempted to 'deal with living 
Scottish preachers, many of whom are worthy of a place 
beside the foremost of those whom I have specified ; and 
if some names which might have been expected to find a 
place in such a review as I have attempted are not re- 



6 PREFACE. 

ferred to, I hope that the limits within which I felt myself 
restricted in such a brief course will be deemed sufficient 
to account for the omission. 

The facts given and the dates mentioned have in all 
cases been faithfully verified, but it is scarcely possible 
that no error has crept in, especially as so many works, 
most of them, alas ! without any index, had to be searched 
for the purpose of insuring accuracy. 

I have to acknowledge my obligation for valuable hints 
as to sources of information which I received from my 
honored friends, Principal Cairns, of Edinburgh ; Pro- 
fessor William Graham, of the Presbyterian College, Lon- 
don ; and President McCosh, of Princeton. 

The preparation of the volume has been throughout a 
labor of love, into which perhaps there has entered also 
somewhat of national enthusiasm and pride; and if it shall 
prove in any way serviceable to the great cause to which 
I have given my life, I shall be abundantly rewarded. 

WM. M. TAYLOR. 

5 West Thirty-fifth Street, 
New York, 1887. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. Introductory and Historical 9 

II. John Knox as a Preacher 45 

III. Melville. — Eutherfurd. — Dickson. — Living- 

stone 72 

IV. Archbishop Leighton. — The Field -preachers . 113 
V. The Moderates and Evangelicals 148 

VI. Thomas Chalmers . . . . . 194 

VII. The Pulpits of the Dissenting Churches . . 230 

INDEX 281 



THE SCOTTISH PULPIT 

FROM 

THE REFORMATION TO THE PRESENT DAY. 



INTRODUCTORY AND HISTORICAL. 

For an intelligent appreciation of the Scottish 
Pulpit we must have some knowledge of the Scot- 
tish character, and some acquaintance with at least 
the main lines of Scottish Ecclesiastical History. 

Between the people and the pulpit of a nation 
action and reaction are continuously operative. 
Originally a man of the people, partaking in all 
their national peculiarities, and educated in the 
midst of them, the preacher has been largely 
moulded by what they are; while, on the other 
hand, his influence tends to modify their disposi- 
tion, and in all times of crisis and agitation be- 
comes a potent factor in the settlement of affairs. 



10 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

The leaves put forth by a tree do at length fall 
from it and fertilize its roots; and the pulpit, 
which is very largely the fruit of a nation's life, 
comes ultimately to affect that life. Or, to bor- 
row the illustration of Mr. Gladstone, the preach- 
er receives from the people in vapor that which he 
gives back to them in flood, but that flood carries 
them away with it to enterprises which else they 
had never undertaken. So in entering upon our 
theme we must pause for a few moments to speak 
of the distinctive features of the Scottish people. 

These are not difficult to discover. Foremost 
among them— indeed the very vertebral column of 
the national character — is sturdy independence. 
The Scotsman insists upon the right to be, and to 
belong to, himself. He will let no one think for 
him or dictate to him. This came out in the pa- 
triotic and political struggles of the people, and also, 
as we shall see, in their ecclesiastical conflicts. But 
it is just as characteristic of the individual as it is 
of the nation as a whole. Their great poet has at 
once expressed and strengthened it by the lyric 
fervor of the glowing song in which these words 
O0cur: 

"The rank is but the guinea's stamp, 
Tho man's the gowd for a' that." 



INTRODUCTORY AND HISTORICAL. 11 

Everywhere the people are jealous of any inter- 
ference with the great human birthright of private 
judgment. The very national motto, with its dis- 
tinct individuality, "Nemo me impune lacessit," is 
an assertion of this quality, and occasionally it has 
run to seed into controversies which have brought 
it wellnigh into ridicule. The youth who, when 
asked why ho was going to the debating society, 
answered, " Oh, jist to contradic' a wee," was per- 
haps an exaggerated specimen, but the right to 
have, to maintain, and to act upon his own convic- 
tion is one which every true Scotsman would de- 
fend to the utmost. 

Behind this independence, as the hot-blast to the 
furnace, is that intensity which has become prover- 
bial as the "prceforvidum ingenium Scotorum," and 
which 'makes him terribly in earnest in everything 
that he does. It acts upon him as a convex lens 
does on the rays of the sun, focusing him upon 
that which he undertakes until it bursts into a 
flame, which may either kindle a holy enthusiasm 
or a destructive conflagration. 

Then, strangely enough, in connection with that 
fervor there is a persistence amounting almost to 
dogged stubbornness which keeps the Scotsman 



12 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

steadily at a thing until he has gained his end. 
This quality of " dourness" — to give it the vernac- 
ular name — makes the true Caledonian everywhere 
pertinacious. He rarely, if ever, lets go that of 
which he has taken hold, and all that he enters 
upon he carries through. He has w T hat I may call 
the spirit of "stick-to-it-iveness" in perfection ; and 
that was a wise prayer which he is said to have 
offered on one occasion : " Lord, grant that we may 
be right, for thou knowest we are very decided." 

Happily, with this indomitable firmness there is 
combined a very large measure of caution, or what 
is commonly ridiculed as " canniness." He leaps 
with intensity, but he looks before he leaps. He 
stands like a rock, because he has first taken care 
to stand on a rock. The high average of intelli- 
gence in the nation consequent upon its excellent 
system of education enables him to see with clear- 
ness where the right lies, and so his persistence, 
which otherwise might have been fraught with mis- 
chief, has been mainly an immense power for good. 

Then there is in him a poetic sense which en- 
ables him to appreciate the ideal, and halos even 
common things for him with " the light which nev- 
er was on sea or land." That had its bright efflo- 



INTRODUCTORY AND HISTORICAL. 13 

rescence and undying illustration in Robert Burns ; 
for he was exceptional only in the fact that his 
genius enabled him to express the feelings which 
were struggling for utterance in his countrymen, 
and to bring into light the poetry that was already 
lying latent in their lives. In him it was creative, 
in them it is receptive; but it is in them, else they 
could not appreciate him as they do — wellnigh to 
the verge of idolatry ; and they who are most con- 
versant with the peasantry of the land will confirm 
me when I say that in their ordinary conversation 
there is not a little of that richness of simile and 
that spirituality of insight which we associate with 
poetry. 

Add to these a humor of a quaint, sometimes 
grim, and occasionally playful sort ; not often bois- 
terous, but when it is, shaking the sides with laugh- 
ter ; frequently sly, or, as they call it, "ypawYie" and 
when there is need, stinging and sarcastic too. Some 
one has said that it requires a surgical instrument 
to get a joke into the head of a Scotsman, but that 
is a libel on the people which probably was never 
meant to be seriously understood ; and every intelli- 
gent reader of Dean Ramsay's book will know what 
value to put upon the assertion. Perhaps the au- 



14 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

thor of it had forgotten to make allowance for the 
fact that, as a rule, the Scotch are undemonstrative, 
and would not be apt to show always that they did 
appreciate a joke. And that reminds me to mention, 
as a feature too important to be lost sight of in our 
present department, the reticence, especially in re- 
gard to sacred things, by which they are character- 
ized. Even in secular affairs they 

" Still keep something to theirsel's 
They scarcely tell to ony " — 

but this reserve is more marked in spiritual matters. 
They feel a great deal more than they say, and they 
are disposed to regard almost as irreverent any com- 
mon reference to personal religious experiences in 
the presence of others.* 

Some of these qualities have been modified in re- 
cent years, but, as a rule, they are still very largely 
characteristic of Scotsmen generalty, and we shall 
find continual illustrations of their influence on their 
greatest preachers, as well as in their Ecclesiastical 
History. Indeed, this last department, owing very 

* This was well illustrated by the remark of the good old 
gentlewoman who said to her young friend, when broaching 
the subject of spiritual experience on the street, " Whist, lassie, 
they are no causey cracks," i.e., subjects for street gossip. 



INTRODUCTORY AND HISTORICAL. 15 

largely to that sturdy individual independence of 
which we have spoken, is to the uninitiated a laby- 
rinth in which they speedily lose themselves; and 
even those who are at home in such matters find it 
a tangled skein requiring both skill and patience for 
its unravelment. Happily for our present purpose, 
all that is necessary is some general acquaintance 
with "the lie of the land," together with an accurate 
knowledge of its water-sheds and divisions. 

Speaking generally, then, we may say that mod- 
ern Scottish Church History may be divided into 
three periods, each remarkable for its own conflict 
running through it, and terminating with its own 
victory. They may be styled the periods of anti- 
popery, anti-prelacy, and anti-patronage. The first 
of these, beginning with Patrick Hamilton, had its 
formal termination in 1567, when the act of Parlia- 
ment which established Protestantism in the coun- 
try was put upon an unquestionable foundation. 
To this period belong the names of Hamilton, Wish- 
art, and Knox — by the last of whom, especially, the 
Reformation was effected and the Protestant Church 
organized after the type of Genevan Presbyterian- 
ism. 



16 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

The anti-prelatic period began almost immediate- 
ly after the death of Knox, in 1572, and continued, 
in one form or another, until the Revolution, in 
1688. Its earliest phasis was closely connected with, 
indeed almost grew up out of, the unwise arrange- 
ment which had been made in the matter of the 
temporalities of the Roman Church, when it was 
disestablished at the Reformation. Greatly to the 
mortification of Knox, w T ho wished to devote the 
larger part of them to education, these were divided 
into three parts, of which two were secured for life 
to the Popish incumbents who had been displaced, 
and one was divided between the Court and the 
Protestant ministers. When, however, these Rom- 
ish life-renters died, the question arose what was to 
be done with their emoluments, and the greedy no- 
bles, eager to get hold of them, fell upon a scheme 
by which they might gain their end. They claimed 
the right of presentation to the benefices, and put 
into them under the old titles men who had first 
pledged themselves to keep only a percentage of the 
incomes, and pass the rest on to their patrons. The 
presentees had the names, and the lords had the 
money, and so the people, with a dash of that humor 
to which I have referred, called them " Tulchan " 



INTRODUCTORY AND HISTORICAL. 17 

bishops — a tulchan being the name given among 
them to the skin of a calf stuffed with straw and 
set up beside a cow to induce her to give her milk 
more freely into the dairy-maid's pail. All this was 
ludicrous enough; but it was the insertion of the 
thin end of the wedge, and many efforts were made 
at a later date to drive it home. When King James 
Sixth of Scotland and First of England came — I 
was going to say to years of discretion, but he never 
really came to them, though he was styled "the 
wisest fool in Christendom ;" let me rather say — to 
mature age, he sought, with intervals of vacillation, 
to act upon his favorite maxim, "JVb bishop; no 
hingP By the issuing of edicts, the prohibition of 
the holding of meetings of the General Assembly of 
the Church, the appointment of bishops, and the 
banishment of the Presbyterian leaders from their 
native land, he endeavored to force Episcopacy in 
Scotland. But the people were unwilling to receive 
it, and he left his project as a legacy to his son 
Charles. To this section of the anti-prelatic period 
belong the names of Andrew Melville, John Welsh, 
and others. 

When, in 1625, Charles the First came to the 
throne, he entered with zest upon the work which 



18 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

his father had been prosecuting, and calling to his 
aid Archbishop Laud, he pushed matters to extrem- 
ities with an issue that was disastrous mainly to 
himself. The act of Jenny Geddes, in 1637, when, 
in the old cathedral of St. Giles, she threw her stool 
at the head of the Dean of Edinburgh as he be- 
gan to read the collect for the day from the new 
liturgy, which was to be forced upon the people 
by the sole authority of the king, and without any 
consultation with them, was the spark that kin- 
dled materials already collected for the fire which 
burned on until the Stuarts were banished from the 
throne, and their divine right nonsense was finally 
exploded. Whether such a liturgy should be used 
or not was, perhaps, no great thing to dispute 
about. Opinions will differ as to that. But wheth- 
er a liturgy of any kind, or, for that matter, any- 
thing at all, should be forced from without on a 
people, without any consultation with them, and 
whether they would have it or not — that was a 
great question, involving in it the liberty of the 
nation; and to divert attention from that to the 
bigotry, as some call it, of those who could dispute 
over the reading of a collect is to evade the issue, 
and mistake entirely the temper of the men who 



INTRODUCTORY AND HISTORICAL. 19 

raised it. People do not call John Hampden stin- 
gy because he refused to pay the few shillings 
which were demanded of him as ship-money by 
the king without the concurrence of Parliament. 
It was not a matter of shillings, but of constitution- 
al right, and in refusing to yield he stood upon the 
principle whicl:f secured the independence of these 
United States — no taxation without representation. 
The difference between liberty and slavery may 
turn upon a little thing, but it is not a little differ- 
ence ; and in this case the emeute in which the 
apple -woman of the High Street of Edinburgh 
played such a prominent part led on and up to the 
Parliamentary struggle and the Civil War, which 
cost Laud and Charles their heads, and culminated, 
for the time, in the Commonwealth and Protecto- 
rate of Cromw T ell. To this stage of the anti-prelatic 
conflict belong the names of Alexander Hender- 
son, Samuel Eutherfurd, and George Gillespie, men 
not unworthy to be the coadjutors of Selden, Vane, 
Howe, Calamy, and others in England. " There 
were giants in those days upon the earth," and 
these were of them. Here also come in the sign- 
ing of the National Covenant in 1638, the adoption 
of the Solemn League and Covenant in 1643, and 



20 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

the sitting of the Westminster Assembly of Di- 
vines during the years 1643-1649. 

Under Cromwell, who was himself an Indepen- 
dent, the Scottish Church, from 1651 to 1658, was 
neither Prelatic nor Presbyterian. He dissolved 
the General Assembly with as little ceremony as 
he did the Long Parliament, and exercised auto- 
cratic power in a manner that brooked no inter- 
ference with his commands. But as one has said, 
"The despot was intelligent and benevolent, and 
no earnest minister w r as suffered to be molested 
while engaged in any spiritual work." * 

When, however, at the Kestoration, in 1660, the 
Stuart Dynasty returned to the throne in the per- 
son of Charles the Second, the cave of JEolus was 
once more opened and 

"Una, Eurusque Notusque ruunt creberque procellis 
Aquilus." 

Everything that had been undone was done again 
more offensively than before. Bishops were sent 
down from England to push Episcopacy on the 
land ; ministers who would not conform were 
ejected from their parishes ; the people were for- 

* "Handbook of Scottish Church History/ ' p. 65. N. L. 
Walker. 



INTRODUCTORY AND HISTORICAL. 21 

bidden to worship elsewhere than in the churches ; 
and those who adhered to the covenant took to the 
glens and the moors, where they held their con- 
venticles in defiance of the law, thereby entailing 
upon themselves cruelties which can be paralleled 
only by the deeds of the Inquisitors of Spain or 
the Dragonades of France. These were the times 
of persecution, 

" Whose echo rings through Scotland to this hour," 

and which lasted through the reigns of Charles the 
Second and James the Second till the day on which 
William of Orange landed at Torbay, on the invita- 
tion of the great majority of the English people, 
to take the throne of their nation at the most crit- 
ical moment of its history. To this section of the 
anti-prelatic period belong such men as Cameron, 
Cargill, Renwick, on the one side, and, singularly 
enough, a saint like Archbishop Leighton on the 
other. But at its close prelacy received its death- 
blow in Scotland, where, ever since, it has been in 
the main an exotic needing the protection of the 
conservatory to keep it from the keen climatic 
winds. 
The Revolution - settlement of Scottish ecclesi- 



22 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

astical matters, however, was not absolutely satis- 
factory to any party, but it was accepted by all save 
the rigid "Society-men," or Cameronians, as the 
best which could be obtained under the circum- 
stances. It was the result of multitudinous nego- 
tiations between William and the Scottish leaders, 
and was comprised in several acts of the Scottish 
Parliament. It abolished Episcopacj', repealed the 
statute by which the Eoyal supremacy in the Church 
had been established ; restored the ministers who 
had been ejected in 1662; opened the way for the 
retention of such of the Episcopal clergy as were 
willing to conform to Presbyterianism ; and legal- 
ized the Westminster Confession of Faith as that of 
the Scottish Church. Over lay patronage, that is, 
the vesting in laymen,'principally land-owners, of the 
right of appointing ministers to congregations, the 
new king hesitated longest, and on that the whole 
matter had nearly suffered shipwreck. William 
was a latitudinarian, or perhaps, more correctly, an 
indifferentist, in Church government, but he was a 
stickler for patronage, regarding it as property be- 
longing to the patrons which should not be inter- 
fered with. At length, however, he gave way so 
far as to consent that — the patrons being compen- 



INTRODUCTORY AND HISTORICAL. 23 

sated in money for what he counted their loss — the 
right of proposing a minister should be vested in a 
parochial council consisting of the Protestant land- 
owners and the elders of the parish, while the con- 
gregation should have liberty to object to the per- 
son proposed, and the Presbytery was authorized to 
determine the validity of the objections. The union 
of England and Scotland came in 1707, and by the 
Act of Security it was ordained that the Confession 
of Faith and the Presbyterian form of government 
should "continue without any alteration to the 
people of the land in all succeeding generations." 
In spite of that guarantee, however, the govern- 
ment of Queen Anne, in 1712, introduced into 
Parliament and carried a measure which took the 
power of electing ministers from the parochial coun- 
cils, and vested it in the ancient patrons, being the 
crown for above five hundred and fifty livings, and 
gentlemen of landed property, town councils, etc., 
for the remaining five hundred. To this enact- 
ment all the secessions from the Scottish Church, 
as by law established, are directly to be traced. ' 

The result of the Eevolution-settlement was that 
at the beginning of the eighteenth century the 
clergy of the Church were made up of what Dr. 



24 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

McCosh has called*" a somewhat heterogeneous 
mixture of covenanting ministers who had lived 
in the times of the persecution ; of prelatic clergy, 
whose convictions in favor of Episcopacy were not 
sufficiently deep to induce them to abandon their 
living; and of a race of young men zealous for the 
Presbyterian establishment, but only ' half-educat- 
ed and superficially accomplished.' " The amalgam 
proved to be a type of preachers who called them- 
selves Moderates, and ultimately became the domi- 
nant party in the Church; when, as Witherspoon 
said, they showed themselves " very immoderate for 
moderation." In their discourses the more highly 
educated of them cultivated the graces of literature 
and rhetoric to a great degree of excellence, but 
avoided all distinctively evangelical topics, and con- 
fined themselves to the truths which are common 
to both natural and revealed religion. They were 
tolerant of everything but evangelical enthusiasm, 
and it was not uncommon that ministers were 
placed by them over congregations who w T ere so 
unwilling to receive them that the military had to 
be called out to preserve the peace during the in- 

* " The Scottish Philosophy," p. 17. James McCosh, DD., 
LL.D. 



INTRODUCTORY AND HISTORICAL. 25 

stallation services. For nearly a hundred years 
they carried matters with a high hand, and the con- 
sequence of their ascendancy was — I quote again 
from McCosh — that " the common people in rural 
districts sank into a stupid ignorance of religious 
truth, and, in the crowded lanes of the rising cities, 
into utter ungodliness and criminality, except in so 
far as " these evils were counteracted " by the rap- 
idly increasing Dissenters, or by the Evangelical 
minority within the Established Church." * 

But there was always a " remnant " which was 
true to the doctrines of grace, and at length the 
members of that "old guard," led by Sir Henry 
Moncrief, Dr. Andrew Thomson, of Edinburgh, and 
afterwards by Dr. Thomas Chalmers, increased in 
numbers to such an extent that they became the 
majority-. This created a great spiritual revival over 
the land, led to extraordinary efforts for what Chal- 
mers called the " excavation " of the heathen at 
home ; to the inauguration of missionary enterprise 
among the heathen abroad ; and ultimately, through 
an effort to get rid of the evils of patronage, arid 
the interference of the civil courts with the spiritual 

* " The Scottish Philosophy, " p. 18. James McCosh, D.D., 
LL.D. 

2 



26 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

independence of the Church, issued in the memora- 
ble Disruption of 1843, when, rather than submit to 
things which were declared to be inseparable from 
their connection with the State Church, more than 
four hundred ministers left their manses and their 
churches and formed the Free Church of Scotland. 
To this period belong, on the Moderate side, Will- 
iam Robertson, the historian, Hugh Blair, the rheto- 
rician, Principal Hill, the theologian, Alexander Car- 
lyle, commonly known as Jupiter Carlyle, and oth- 
ers; and on the Evangelical, Dr. John Erskine, the 
correspondent of Jonathan Edwards, John Maclau- 
rin, John Witherspoon, Andrew Thomson, Thomas 
Chalmers, and his trusty lieutenants, Candlish, Cun- 
ningham, Buchanan, and Guthrie. It may be said 
to have come to an end with the passing of Dis- 
raeli's bill for the abolition of Patronage in 1874. 
But within these recent years another period, which 
will be known in history as the Anti-State-Church 
period, has begun, and of that we may say that the 
issue is not doubtful, though it may not be imme- 
diate. 

I have confined myself thus far, for the sake of 
clearness, to the direct course of the Established 



INTRODUCTORY AND HISTORICAL. 27 

Church ; but now I must go back and trace the rise 
and progress of the Dissenting denominations. The 
Cameronians, or Society -men, known more lately 
as the Reformed Presbyterian Church, never en- 
tered into the Church of the Revolution-settlement. 
They insisted that the monarch and people should 
accept and subscribe to the National Covenant, and 
because they could not secure that, they declined to 
perform all the duties of citizenship, though they 
maintained a high standard of religious character. 
Their Church never grew into much strength, and 
latterly the larger number of their congregations 
united with the Free Church, leaving not more 
than half a score — if so many — to perpetuate the 
name. 

The first Secession dates from 1733, and is con- 
nected primarily witli the name of Ebenezer Ers- 
kine. In that year a sermon was preached by Mr. 
Erskine, as retiring moderator of the Synod of 
Perth and Stirling, in which he protested both elo- 
quently and forcibly against the evils then existing 
in the Church, and especially against that of Patron- 
age. For this he was by the Synod pronounced 
worthy of censure, and on appeal to the General 
Assembly he was, along with three other brethren 



28 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

who by that time had placed themselves by his side, 
summarily cast out of the Church. These four 
formed themselves into a Presbytery, and pro- 
claimed the right of the members of the Church to 
choose their own ministers and office-bearers. By 
the year 1747 they had grown into a denomination 
of forty -five congregations; but at that date an 
unhappy controversy arose among them over the 
lawfulness of taking an oath which was adminis- 
tered to those who became burgesses in certain cit- 
ies and towns of the country, and which pledged 
the obtestant to uphold " the true religion present- 
ly professed within the realm." This was supposed 
by some to refer simply to the Protestant religion, 
and those who w T ere of that opinion believed that 
any Seceder might take the oath ; but by others it 
was held to signify the Established Church of the 
country, and those who maintained that construc- 
tion believed that no Seceder could consistently 
come under such an obligation. Between these 
two parties the contention was so sharp that they 
parted asunder the one from the other, and the 
former were popularly known as Burghers, the lat- 
ter as Anti-Burghers.* These two denominations 

* These names have been much ridiculed, and often very 



INTRODUCTORY AND HISTORICAL. 29 

grew up side by side, holding no communion with 
each other, until in a spring-tide of prayerful fellow- 
ship they came together again in 1820, and formed 
the United Secession Church, which numbered at 
that date two hundred and sixty-two congregations, 
and continued to increase until, in 1847, it aggre- 
gated more than four hundred congregations. 

Meanwhile a second secession from the estab- 
lished Church had taken place. It was called the 
Relief Church, and had its origin, in 1752, in the 
deposition of Thomas Gillespie, minister of Carnock, 
for refusing to obey the order of the General As- 
sembly commanding him to take part in the settle- 
ment over the parish of Inverkeithing of a minister 
who was obnoxious to the people. Gillespie meek- 
ly retired to Dunfermline, where he gathered round 



greatly misunderstood. An amusing instance of misappre- 
hension regarding one of them may here be given. Some 
twenty years ago or more an application was made to a benev- 
olent committee in Edinburgh on behalf of a lady in reduced 
circumstances, described as "the daughter" of an Anti-Burgh- 
er minister. The late Bishop Terrot, who was presiding, said, 
in all good faith, " Gentlemen, I have lived many years in Scot- 
land, but I am ashamed to say I need to ask, Where is Anti- 
Burgher?" The naivete with which the good bishop, while con- 
fessing to one sort of ignorance manifests another still more 
dense, is exceedingly delicious. 



30 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

him a congregation, and where for six years he 
stood alone without any ecclesiastical connection. 
At the end of that time he was joined by Thomas 
Boston, son of the author of "The Fourfold State," 
and in 1761 a Presbytery was formed which took 
the name of Belief, because its purpose was to fur- 
nish "relief" to those churches into which pastors 
had been violently intruded by Patronage enforced 
through the civil law. This purpose it carried out 
so effectively that in 1847 it numbered seven Pres- 
byteries, with an aggregate of one hundred and 
fourteen congregations ; and in that year these two 
bodies — the United Secession and the Relief — came 
together and formed what is now known as the 
United Presbyterian Church of Scotland. These 
churches, even in their separate state, exercised a 
great influence over the land. They kept the lamp 
of truth aflame in many parishes where but for 
them its rays had never shone, and the freedom of 
their environment allowed room for development. 
Adopting at first from necessity the practice of 
supporting their ministers by the free-will offer- 
ings of the people, they came at length to the per- 
ception of the truth that this is the normal state 
of a Church's life; and now, as a matter of fact, 



INTRODUCTORY AND HISTORICAL. 31 

though it is not a term of communion among 
them, they are almost without exception the advo- 
cates of Anti- State -churchism. They have out- 
grown, also, very largely the narrowness of mis- 
taking points for principles. The Relief Church 
was the first Presbyterian Church in Scotland to 
introduce the singing of hymns into the worship 
of the congregation ; and the United Church has 
led the way in the modification of subscription to 
creeds by the adoption of a declaratory statement 
which interprets the sense in which the West- 
minster Confession is accepted.* The next union 
will probably be between the United Presbyterian 
and Free churches; and if the Anti-State-Church 
movement should be successful, it is not impossible 
that after the wounds of the conflict have been 
healed -the union may include also that which is 
now the Established Church. 

To the dissenting bodies whose course I have 
thus sketched belong the Erskines, Ralph and Eb- 
enezer; the John Browns, father, son, and grand- 
son ; George Lawson, John Dick, William Ander- 
son, David King, John Eadie; and among living 

* See note at the end of this lecture. 



32 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

preachers, John Cairns, John Ker,* and others, 
who have contributed largely to the homiletical 
and theological literature of their native land. 

All these denominations came directly out of 
the Established Church, retaining the Westminster 
Confession as their doctrinal standard, and the Pres- 
byterian polity as their form of government. It 
was otherwise, however, with the Congregational- 
ism whose existence in Scotland began about the 
commencement of this century. It arose in the 



* I leave this name to stand in the text as it was originally 
written though now, alas ! Dr. Ker has passed away, to the 
great grief of the entire Scottish nation. His volumes of ser- 
mons may give to readers on both sides of the Atlantic some 
idea of the place which he held as a preacher; but only those 
who knew him in the familiar intercourse of private life can 
form any adequate conception of the fulness of his informa- 
tion on all subjects, the soundness of his judgment, the warmth 
of his heart, the fineness of his humor, or the depth of his pa- 
thos. It was worth going a long way to hear him read some 
of the old metrical Psalms; and those who ridicule these pro- 
ductions would have altered their opinion could they have lis- 
tened to his recitation of them. As to his discourses, great as 
they are, their greatness is not that of effort, for he never seems 
to be putting forth his whole strength in them. They have all 
the ease of spontaneity; they are, as it were, an efflorescence 
exhaling of itself, and revealing something still greater in the 
man himself. 



INTRODUCTORY AND HISTORICAL. 33 

north of Scotland, as Dr. Alexander* says, "not 
in consequence of any departure on the part of its 
leaders from the doctrinal standards of the Estab- 
lished Church, nor from any speculative preference 
of a different form of church polity from that 
which hereditary attachment and the memory of 
past struggles and endurance, as well as conscien- 
tious conviction, had so endeared to the people of 
Scotland. . . . Theirs was from the beginning a 
movement of a purely spiritual kind. Like Meth- 
odism in England, the secession which they headed 
had its source simply in a craving for more life, 
more energy, more spiritual freedom and diffusive- 
ness, than they could find in existing systems. They 
felt a need for a higher kind of spiritual nourish- 
ment than they had been accustomed to, and for 
more of -warmth and heartiness in the proclamation 
of religious truth to men, than the fashion of pul- 
pit address at that time permitted." 

The men who were most prominent in this move- 
ment were the brothers Haldane. Mr. James A. 
Haldane, who had been a sea-captain, but had grown 
into very intense spiritual convictions, came out as 

* "Memoir of Ralph Wardlaw, D.D.," p. 38. W. L. Alex- 
ander, D.D. 

2* 



34 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

a lay- preacher, and visited several districts of the 
country, addressing immense multitudes of people, 
and awakening much spiritual interest by his fer- 
vent evangelical discourses. Mr. Robert Haldane 
promoted the same cause by the erection of suitable 
places of worship, the support of preachers in them, 
and the institution of a seminary for the training of 
ministers. Rowland Hill, Matthew Wilks, and oth- 
ers, came from England to their assistance. Crowds 
attended wherever they preached, so that they had 
often to meet in the open air, and sometimes as 
many as from fifteen to twenty thousand persons 
were computed to be present. This drew upon 
them the antagonism of some of the other denom- 
inations, notably the Established Church and the 
Anti- Burgher and Relief Synods, and their inde- 
pendent position was in a manner forced upon them 
by this lack of wisdom in the older bodies. Their 
success is thus accounted for by Dr. Alexander in a 
passage which I quote, not only for its bearing on 
the matter in hand, but also because it incidentally 
corroborates from another point of view some of the 
statements which I have made in other connections: 
"In the National Church the long reign of Moder- 
atism had done much to extrude all vital godliness, 



INTRODUCTORY AND HISTORICAL. 35 

and to reduce the Christianity of both pastors and 
people to the lowest degree of attenuation com- 
patible with the retention of the name. The ma- 
jority of the ministers were avowedly Arminian, if 
not Pelagian, in their doctrinal views ; not a few of 
them were Crypto -Socinians, and it was even in- 
sinuated that some holding no mean place in the 
Church were more than imbued witli the scepti- 
cism of Hume. A few noble spirits still held aloft 
the banner of Evangelical orthodoxy, and stood 
valiantly by it, but they formed so slender a pro- 
portion of the whole that their efforts could do com- 
paratively little towards counteracting the unwhole- 
some influence of the majority. In the dissenting 
churches the state of things was undoubtedly great- 
ly better, for in them no toleration was given to 
unsound doctrine, and the tone of religious senti- 
ment and feeling was much higher than in the Es- 
tablishment. Still there was but little of energetic 
piety even among them ; little of aggressive activi- 
ty in the propagation of the Gospel ; little of what 
Shaftesbury derisively and yet most truly called 
'the heroic passion of saving souls;' and along 
with this there was a much too prevalent disposi- 
tion to set the mere apparatus of ecclesiastical order 



36 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

above the great ends for which such alone is valu- 
able. And as religion shared in the general apathy 
amid which the eighteenth century was advan- 
cing to its close, so it shared, also, in that sudden 
awakening which the startling events in the neigh- 
boring country [i.e., France] had produced. Men 
roused out of their long repose became painfully 
aware of necessities which craved immediate relief. 
They felt that hunger of soul for suitable spiritual 
food which naturally follows a long period of spir- 
itual destitution or inadequate supply. And as the 
existing ecclesiastical bodies were not sufficiently 
elastic — did not quickly enough expand — to meet 
the new and enlarged capacities and wants of the 
people, the latter impetuously rushed forth to find 
elsewhere what was denied them at home. Hence 
the crowds that followed Messrs. Haldane and Aik- 
man on their first tours of preaching through Scot- 
land. Hence the thousands upon thousands that 
covered the slopes of the Calton Hill to listen to 
the preachers from England ; and hence the al- 
most instantaneous rise into considerable strength 
of a new religious body hitherto nearly unknown 
in Scotland, and for which, as subsequent events 
proved, the Scottish mind was not in reality cordial- 



INTRODUCTORY AND HISTORICAL. 37 

ly prepared. The new wine could not be stayed in 
the old bottles, and so when it burst forth it was 
caught and kept by those who alone at the time 
were prepared to receive it." * 

As the remark of Alexander near the close of the 
above extract confesses, Congregationalism has not 
grown into great proportions in Scotland, though 
for the year 1886-1887 1 find one hundred churches 
returned ; but no review of the Scottish Pulpit can 
afford to leave out the denomination which num- 
bered among its preachers such men as Wardlaw 
and Alexander. 

In the w r ake of the Eevival out of which Con- 
gregationalism arose in Scotland a Baptist contro- 
versy sprung up, and in many of the towns Bap- 
tist churches were formed ; but although some of 
the preachers of that denomination have attained to 
honorable place, it cannot be said that the denom- 
ination, at least until very recently, has greatly 
flourished in Scotland. In many places its mem- 
bers evinced a disposition to dispute over little mat- 
ters, which led to divisions and subdivisions, while 

* " Memoir of Ralph Wardlaw/' ubi sup., pp. 43, 44. 



38 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

some of them adopted views opposed to the pay- 
ment of pastors and the education of the ministry, 
which led among them to a "small-meeting-ism" not 
unlike that of the Plymouth Brethren in England. 
The Baptist Union of Scotland reported, however, 
in 1884 an aggregate of eighty-nine churches, and 
that organization is becoming a worthy sister of its 
English namesake. 

The Evangelical Union had its origin in the Atone- 
ment controversy which shook the United Secession 
Church for years in the fifth decade of this cen- 
tury, and in the very hottest stage of which James 
Morison, now so widely known as one of our great- 
est Hew Testament exegetes, w r as deposed from the 
ministry for holding opinions on the extent of the 
Atonement, the Divine decrees, and the work of the 
Holy Spirit, akin to those of the Cumberland Pres- 
byterian Church of America. He was joined by 
some ministers of the Secession Church who sym- 
pathized with his views, and by fifteen students who 
had been expelled from the Congregational Theo- 
logical Seminary for maintaining the same doctrines. 
This new organization speedily instituted a theo- 
logical seminary, and now it numbers about a hun- 



INTRODUCTORY AND HISTORICAL. 39 

dred churches which are independent in government. 
It is not improbable that in the course of time this 
denomination and that of the Congregationalists 
will become one. 

Such is a brief outline of the course of Church 
History in Scotland since the Reformation. I have 
not mentioned one or two of the smaller bodies lest 
I should confuse you by going too minutely into 
detail ; but I have said enough to make intelligible 
to you those incidental references which must be 
inevitable in the prosecution of our special theme, 
and I conclude this prefatory Lecture with a descrip- 
tion of the curriculum of study required by these 
different denominations as preparatory to entrance 
into the ministry. 

With- the single exception of those small Bap- 
tist churches to which I have referred, and which 
are gradually disappearing, they are all alive to 
the importance of an educated ministry. There 
have been exceptional times and cases in the his- 
tory of each of them when a university course 
or a theological training — properly so called — was 
dispensed with; but all the Presbyterian bodies 
require a full arts course of four years at one or 



40 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

other of the National Universities, and in addi- 
tion each insists upon a three years' course at its 
own theological seminary. Up till 1876 the Theo- 
logical Seminary of the United Presbyterian Church, 
alike in its separate branches and in its united 
state, held its sessions for only two months of the 
year, and students were required to attend it for 
five sessions; while during the other ten months 
of these years they were under the care of their 
respective Presbyteries, before which they had to 
perform specified exercises, undergo prescribed ex- 
aminations, and preach a certain number of dis- 
courses. This plan was suited to the circumstances 
of the students in the early history of these denom- 
inations, and enabled them to support themselves 
by teaching or otherwise in the intervals between 
the sessions. But in the year above specified the 
United Presbyterian Church came into line with 
its sister denominations, and now its professors hold 
no pastoral charge and teach for five or six months 
annually. 

The Congregationalists and Evangelical Union- 
ists do not count a University curriculum essential, 
though they prefer that it should be taken, and the 
seminary of the latter still follows the old Secession 



INTRODUCTORY AND HISTORICAL. 41 

plan of a two months' session. Bursaries or scholar- 
ships are provided in the universities and in the sem- 
inaries, and are allocated for the most part by com- 
petitive examination ; but they are few in number 
compared with the number of students. There are 
no Education Societies such as we have in this 
country, and students have to push their way as 
best they can, without the help that flows on this 
side of the water from these sources ; but that does 
not keep them back; and there are few chapters 
of "Self -Help" more heroic and spirit-stirring 
than those whicli the histories of the early struggles 
of many of our Scottish clergy would supply. The 
result has been what we may call " a survival of 
the fittest." The men who have gone through such 
a pathway to the ministry are apt to stay in it 
when they get there, and they are pretty sure to be 
heard from to some purpose. Such a biography as 
that of Dr. Robertson, first of Errol and afterwards 
of Edinburgh, from the pen of the accomplished 
Dr. Charteris, is typical of multitudes ; and the early 
struggles of Thomas Carlyle on his way to his life 
work were no greater, and no more resolutely and 
bravely battled through, than those of many who 
have said far less about them, and have made their 



42 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

way to the foremost pulpits of their own or other 
lands. Indeed, most of the Scottish clergy might 
adopt the words of Edmund Burke with but a 
single change, and say, " I was not swaddled and 
rocked and dandled into a minister. 'Nitor in ad- 
versum' is the motto for a man like me." But they 
have not been the worse for that; nay, they have 
been all the better for that, since knowing what 
struggle is, they have been so much the abler to 
speak " words in season " to those who are strug- 
gling, and that has been one element of their power. 

Note. See page 31. 
Declaratory Act of the United Presbyterian Church. 
As this Declaratory Act is the earliest attempt on the part 
of any Presbyterian Church to define the sense in which the 
Westminster Standards are understood to be subscribed by its 
office-bearers, and as it is not very widely known on this side 
of the Atlantic, we give it here in full: 

11 Whereas the formula in which the Subordinate Standards of 
this Church are accepted requires assent to them as an exhibi- 
tion of the sense in which the Scriptures are understood : Where- 
as these Standards, being of human composition, are necessarily 
imperfect, and the Church has already allowed exception to be 
taken to their teaching or supposed teaching on one important 
subject: And whereas there are other subjects in regard to which 
it has been found desirable to set forth more fully and clearly 
the views which the Synod takes of the teaching of Holy 
Scripture: Therefore, the Synod hereby declares as follows: 



INTRODUCTORY AND HISTORICAL. 43 

" 1. That in regard to the doctrine of redemption as taught in 
the Standards, and in consistency therewith, the love of God to 
all mankind, His gift of His Son to be the propitiation for the 
sins of the whole world, and the free offer of salvation to men 
without distinction on the ground of Christ's perfect sacrifice, 
are matters which have been and continue to be regarded by 
this Church as vital in the system of gospel truth, and to which 
due prominence ought ever to be given. 

"2. That the doctrine of the divine decrees, including the 
doctrine of election to eternal life, is held in connection and 
harmony with the truth that God is not willing that any should 
perish, but that all should come to repentance, and that He 
has provided a salvation sufficient for all, adapted to all, and 
offered to all in the gospel; and also with the responsibility of 
every man for his dealing with the free and unrestricted offer 
of eternal life. 

1 ' 3. That the doctrine of man's total depravity, and of his loss 
of ' all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying sal- 
vation/ is not held as implying such a condition of man's 
nature as would affect his responsibility under the law of God 
and the gospel of Christ, or that he does not experience the 
strivings and restraining influences of the Spirit of God, or that 
he cannot perform actions in any sense good; although actions 
which do not spring from a renewed heart are not spiritually 
good or holy — such as accompany salvation. 

"4. That while none are saved except through the mediation 
of Christ, and by the grace of His Holy Spirit, who worketh 
when, and where, and how it pleaseth Him ; while the duty of 
sending the gospel to the heathen, who are sunk in ignorance, 
sin, and misery, is clear and imperative; and while the outward 
and ordinary means of salvation for those capable of being 
called by the Word are the ordinances of the gospel; in accept- 
ing the Standards, it is not required to be held that any who 
die in infancy are lost, or that God may not extend His grace 
to any who are without the pale of ordinary means, as it may 
seem good in His sight. 



44 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

"5. That in regard to the doctrine of the Civil Magistrate, 
and his authority and duty in the sphere of religion, as taught 
in the Standards, this Church holds that the Lord Jesus Christ 
is the only King and Head of the Church, and i Head over all 
things to the Church, which is His body;' disapproves of all 
compulsory or persecuting and intolerant principles in religion; 
and declares, as hitherto, that she does not require approval of 
anything in her Standards that teaches, or may be supposed to 
teach, such principles. 

" 6. That Christ has laid it as a permanent and universal obli- 
gation upon His Church, at once to maintain her own ordi- 
nances, and to 'preach the gospel to every creature ;' and has 
ordained that His people provide by their free-will offerings for 
the fulfilment of this obligation. 

"7. That, in accordance with the practice hitherto observed 
in this Church, liberty of opinion is allowed on such points in 
the Standards, not entering into the substance of the faith, as the 
interpretation of the ' six days ' in the Mosaic account of the 
creation: the Church guarding against the abuse of this liberty 
to the injury of its unity and peace." 

The following question of the formula contains the terms in 
which the Subordinate Standards are accepted by the office- 
bearers of the Church*: "Do you acknowledge the West- 
minster Confession of Faith and the Larger and Shorter Cate- 
chisms as an exhibition of the sense in which you understand 
the Holy Scriptures, this acknowledgment being made in view 
of the explanations contained in the Declaratory Act of Synod 
thereanent? ,, 



II. 

JOHN KNOX AS A PREACHER. 

We begin with John Knox, not only because 
through his instrumentality under God the Refor- 
mation in Scotland was mainly secured, but also 
because there are traces of his influence as a preach- 
er to be discovered in the discourses of his success- 
ors down almost to the present day. He inaugu- 
rated a style which to the readers of these times 
seems much less antiquated than that of some sub- 
sequent periods, because at every era of crisis and 
revival in the land the earnest evangelical leaders 
who sought to conserve what he had gained went 
back to him as their model, and drew inspiration 
from his works. His " History of the Reforma- 
tion " holds its place to this day among the books 
in the " cupboard libraries " of the Scottish peas- 
antry, and even so lately as the time of the Disrup- 
tion a volume of selections from his writings had a 
circulation of forty-four thousand copies, principally 
among the same class. Nor is it difficult from the 



46 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

study of these to discover in what particulars he, 
as it were, set the fashion for the preachers who 
came after him. But before we attempt to point 
these out we must first mark well the genesis of 
this particular method in himself, and for that pur- 
pose we need to take a brief review of his personal 
history. 

Knox did not become a preacher until he had at- 
tained the age of forty-two. Born in 1505, he is 
found among the incorporated students of the Uni- 
versity of Glasgow in 1522; and after his education 
was finished he seems to have entered the priest- 
hood of the Roman Catholic Church, and to have 
continued in it up, at least, to 1543, for his name is 
found as notary affixed to a document which is still 
extant, and which bears that date. His first known 
public appearance on the side of Protestantism was 
in the beginning of 1546, when he attended George 
Wishart to Haddington as the bearer of a large 
two-handed sword to protect him from assault. 
His proper vocation, however, at this time was that 
of a teacher of youth, and to that, at Wishart's en- 
treaty, he returned on the night of that martyr's 
apprehension. Up to that date, therefore, he had 
not entered upon the Protestant ministry, and as 



JOHN KNOX AS A PREACHER. 47 

the manner of his call thereto had much to do with 
the power of his preaching all through his later life, 
we cannot afford to ignore it in this place. 

It was "on this wise." After the assassination 
of Cardinal Beaton the Castle of St. Andrews re- 
mained for a season in the hands of the men who 
had planned and carried out the " removal " of that 
prelate. It thus became a place of refuge for the 
Protestants, even if they did not all approve of 
the deed which had given them possession of the 
stronghold. Knox had nothing to do with the 
murder of the cardinal, but for his ow r n safety 
and that of his pupils he took them with him into 
the Castle of St. Andrews about the Easter of 1547, 
and there conducted his regular tutorial work with 
them from day to day. What that was he has thus 
described : " Beside their grammar and other hu- 
mane authors he read unto them a catechism, an ac- 
count whereof he caused them to give publicly in 
the parish church of St. Andrews. He read, more- 
over, unto them the Gospel of John, proceeding 
where he had left off at his departure from Long- 
niddry, where before his residence was, and that 
lecture he read in the chapel at a certain hour." 
These public exercises were regularly attended by 



48 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

a large number of those who were sojourning with- 
in the castle, and the result was that Henry Bal- 
naves, a distinguished Scottish priest, Sir David 
Lindsay, the poet, and others, recognizing his fit- 
ness for the work, urged him most earnestly to en- 
ter on the ministry of the Gospel. But he stren- 
uously refused, declaring that " he would not run 
where God had not called him." They were not, 
however, to be thus gainsaid, and therefore they 
arranged that on a certain day John Rough, who 
was pastor of the Castle church, should, in the name 
and behalf of the Church, give him unexpectedly 
a public call to the ministry. So, after having 
preached a sermon on the election of ministers, 
Rough, in the presence of all the congregation, 
turned to Knox and said, " Brother, ye shall not be 
offended, albeit that I speak unto you that which I 
have in charge, even from all those that are here 
present, which is this : In the name of God and of 
His Son Jesus Christ, and in the name of those that 
presently call you by my mouth, I charge you that 
ye refuse not this holy vocation, but that, as ye ten- 
der the glory of God, the increase of Christ's king- 
dom, the edification of your brethren, and the com- 
fort of me, whom you understand well enough to be 



JOHN KNOX AS A PREACHER. 49 

oppressed by the multitude of labors, that ye take 
upon you the public office and charge of preaching, 
even as ye look to avoid God's heavy displeasure, 
and desire that He shall multiply His graces with 
you." Then turning to the congregation, he said, 
" Was not this your charge to me V 9 They an- 
swered, " It was, and we approve it." The sudden- 
ness and solemnity of this call thoroughly un- 
manned Knox, who burst into a flood of tears and 
hastened to his closet, where we may well believe 
that he sought light from God. The result was 
that he was led to take up that work which he laid 
down only with his life. Not from the impulse of 
caprice, or because he desired the position of a 
preacher, but because he could not otherwise meet 
the responsibility which God had laid upon him, 
did he enter upon the work of the pulpit. He be- 
came a minister, not because he must be something, 
but because he could not be anything else without 
disobedience to God. He was to do a work for his 
countrymen not unlike that which Moses did for 
his kindred, and so, like Moses, he was called to it 
in the full strength of his manhood, and he en- 
tered upon it with the full persuasion that necessity 
was laid upon him, and woe was unto him if he 



50 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

preached not the Gospel. That not only made him 
a preacher, but it also helped very largely to make 
him such a preacher as he afterwards became. 

Not long, however, was he permitted at this time 
to continue in the work which was thus begun; 
for in the month of July of that same year a 
French fleet invested the castle, whose defenders 
very soon surrendered, and Knox, being carried off 
a prisoner to France, was held for nineteen months 
as a galley-slave. After enduring great hardships 
he was liberated in the early part of 1549, when he 
went to England, where, under Edward the Sixth, 
he labored for some years, first in Berwick, then in 
Newcastle, and finally as a royal chaplain, with a 
commission which sent him to preach in different 
parts of the kingdom. After the accession of Mary 
Tudor to the throne, however, it was no longer safe 
for him to remain in England ; and in the end of 
1553 he removed to the Continent, where, after 
spending some time with Calvin in Geneva, he be- 
came one of the ministers of a church of English 
refugees which had been formed in Frankfort-on- 
the-Main. But troubles with the High -Church 
portion of the congregation, on which we cannot 
enter here, led him to return to Geneva, w T here he 



JOHN KNOX AS A PKEACHER. 51 

was chosen to be one of the pastors of the English 
Church that had been formed in that city. We 
mention these particulars because there is no doubt 
that the experiences through which Knox had 
passed in these different circumstances, and the wis- 
dom which he had acquired through converse with 
some of the greatest of the Reformers both in Eng- 
land and on the Continent, contributed very much 
to the power of his ultimate ministry in Scotland. 
With him everything he had and learned was made 
to contribute to the pulpit. That was the throne 
of his peculiar and pre-eminent power, and the 
treasures of travel, as well as the accumulations of 
study and observation, were made to minister to his 
efficiency therein. 

From the latter part of 1559 till his death in 
1572 he continued to labor in Scotland. For the 
greater portion of that time he was pastor of St. 
Giles's Church, Edinburgh ; and it may be interest- 
ing to read the record of his stated labors there, at 
least for the first few years. He preached twice 
every Sunday, and three times during the week 
besides. He met regularly once a week with his 
elders for the oversight of the flock, and attended 
weekly the assembly of ministers for what was 



52 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

called " the exercise on the Scriptures." Add to 
these that he was frequently appointed to perform 
in distant parts of the country duties akin to those 
of a superintendent, and we can understand how it 
came that his people gave him a colleague in 1563 
to relieve him of some of the work by which he 
was oppressed. 

Of his sermons only one complete specimen, print- 
ed under his own supervision, remains. He was too 
busy a man to write much for the press ; and if he 
had not been called in question by the Privy Council 
for something in that discourse which had wounded 
the pride of the young Darnley, who happened to 
be present on the occasion of its delivery, we should 
not have had even that from his own pen. He tells 
us in the preface to it that " he considered himself 
rather called of God to instruct the ignorant, com- 
fort the sorrowful, confirm the weak, and rebuke 
the proud by tongue and living voice, in these most 
corrupt times, than to compose books for the age to 
come; and seeing that so much is written (and that 
by men of most singular condition), and yet so little 
well observed, he decreed to contain himself within 
the bounds of that vocation whereunto he felt him- 
self specially called." But while all that is true, 



'JOHN KNOX AS A PREACHER. 53 

we Lave in his letters to his old parishioners in 
Berwick and Newcastle, and in some others of his 
works, sufficient hints let fall to indicate how he 
prepared for the pulpit, while in the statements of 
his contemporaries we have one or two very graphic 
descriptions of his manner in it. 

He was a diligent student. In one of his letters 
he describes himself as "sitting at his books" and 
contemplating Matthew's Gospel by the help of 
"some most godly expositions, and among the rest 
Chrysostom." In another he writes : " This day 
ye know to be the day of my study and prayer to 
God." And in one of his interviews with Queen 
Mary he excuses himself from going to her private- 
ly when he had occasion to condemn her policy, by 
alleging that he was not appointed to go to every 
man in particular, and saying, "Albeit I am here 
now at your Grace's command, yet cannot I tell 
what other men shall judge of me, that at this 
time of day am absent from my book and waiting 
upon the court." He made good use, therefore, we 
may be sure, of that "warm study with deals" 
which was constructed for him at the expense of 
the City Council of Edinburgh, and which is still 
to be seen in his house at the Netherbow. 



54 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

He had a competent knowledge of Greek. He- 
brew he learned after he had passed his fiftieth 
year, and while he sojourned in Geneva ; and the 
mention of Chrysostom and other expositors in the 
quotation just given shows that he was ready and 
able to accept light from works which are still 
sealed books to many. 

But the fruit of his study was never a fully writ* 
ten out discourse. As we learn from an incidental 
sentence in his " Faithful Admonition unto the 
Professors of God's Truth in England," it was his 
habit to speak from a few notes which were made 
on the margin of his Bible, and which remained the 
sole written memoranda of his discourse. He nev- 
er wrote his sermons before preaching, and seldom, 
if ever, except on the occasions already alluded to, 
wrote them after. Yet they were as carefully pre- 
meditated as if they had been written, and he could 
apparently recall them, almost verbatim, for a long 
time afterwards. Thus we find in some of his ad- 
dresses to his friends in Berwick, Newcastle, and in 
England generally, long. quotations from discourses 
which had been delivered years before; and on one 
occasion when he had been, as he claimed, misre- 
ported to Queen Mary, he went over the whole 



JOHN KNOX AS A PREACHER. 55 

sermon there and then before her and the members 
of her court, and his repetition was declared to be 
accurate by those who had heard it in the church. 
This indicates both that he prepared with care and 
that he remembered with accuracy. He did not 
speak extemporaneously, in the sense of never hav- 
ing thought upon his subject until he was required 
to speak ; but he had fixed beforehand his line of 
thought, and there is reason to believe, also, in 
many cases, the very words in which he had deter- 
mined to express himself. Yet, though he premed- 
itated very carefully, he was able also to introduce 
what was given to him at the moment; for when, 
on one occasion, Kirkaldy appeared in the cathedral 
with a retinue of armed men, as if to intimidate 
him, he did not hesitate to bring into the body of 
his sermon a very stern rebuke of that which he re- 
garded as a serious offence on the part of one who 
had been a companion with him in the galleys of 
France. 

The form of his discourses was expository. This 
is evident not only from that one which he printed 
in self-vindication, but also from the others which 
he has referred to and described in portions of his 
writings. He set himself at first calmly, clearly, 



56 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

and fully to explain the meaning of the passage on 
which he was engaged. He was particular to bring 
out its application to the occasion in reference to 
which it was employed by the sacred writer. In 
this portion of the discourse there was evidence of 
considerable scholarship, immense familiarity with 
Scripture, good acquaintance with ancient history, 
and great fervor of spirit. Having thus brought 
out the meaning of the passage, he then set himself 
to enforce its practical bearing on the circumstances 
of his hearers and his times, taking care first to 
establish the parallelism between the original case 
referred to by the sacred writer and that to which 
he applied it. This was the tip of the arrow, to 
which all else was but its feather; and in the shoot- 
ing of that arrow he spared neither age nor sex, 
neither rank nor class. Wherever he saw an evil 
which the principle in his text condemned, he 
brought it to bear with all his might thereon. He 
recognized the explanation of the present in the 
old inspired record of the past ; and reading Scot- 
tish history in the light of that of the Israelites, he 
found constant opportunity for this kind of practi- 
cal application. 

His expositions were frequently consecutive, and 



JOHN KNOX AS A PKEACHER. 57 

carried on through a whole book of Scripture. 
When the famous Parliament of 1560 was in ses- 
sion he was "lecturing" through the prophecies of 
Haggai, and had suggested thereby many powerful 
and pungent things bearing on the reorganization 
of the Scottish Church, on which the States of the 
Realm were then engaged. There is evidence, also, 
that he favored as a general thing the practice of 
continuous exposition, as being fraught with profit 
both to preacher and hearer ; for in the First Book 
of Discipline, which was drawn up mainly by him, 
we have the following direction regarding the pub- 
lic reading of the Scriptures: "We think it most 
expedient that the Scriptures be read in order — that 
is, that some one book of the Old and the New Tes- 
tament be begun, and orderly read to the end. And 
the same we judge of preaching, where the minister 
for the most part vemaineth in one place ; for this 
skipping and divagation from place to place, be it 
in reading, be it in preaching, we judge not so prof- 
itable to edify the church as the continual following 
of one text." 

In his style he was plain, direct, homely, some- 
times humorous, and always courageous. His lan- 
guage, however, would seem to have been purer 
3* 



58 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

and more free from solecisms than that of most of 
his contemporaries, for one of his adversaries taunts 
him with his " Southron tongue." But if, like Jef- 
frey, he had parted in any degree with his " broad 
Scotch," it could not be said of him, as Cockburn 
did of Jeffrey, that he had acquired only the "nar- 
row English ;" for he had not polished away any of 
his power, and he never quailed before antagonism. 
At a time when anonymous writings were freely 
circulated against him he did not flinch, but aver- 
red that from Isaiah, Jeremiah, and other inspired 
writers, he " had learned, plainly and boldly, to call 
wickedness by its own terms — a fig a fig, and a spade 
a spade;" thus using for the first time words which 
have become proverbial in the language. Occasion- 
ally, too, he brought in withering irony to bear on 
that to which he was opposed. His prologue to his 
report of his disputation with the Abbot of Cross- 
raguel reads like a bit of a sermon on the idolatry 
of the Mass, and is an excellent illustration of his 
most trenchant manner. 

Here is a specimen. He has been comparing the 
making of what he calls the " wafer-god " to that of 
the idols so sarcastically described by Isaiah in the 
fortieth and forty-first chapters of his prophecies, 



JOHN KNOX AS A PREACHER. 59 

and after speaking of the workmen engaged in 
both, he proceeds as follows : " These are the arti- 
ficers and workmen that travail in the making of 
this god. I think as many as the prophet reciteth 
to have travailed in making of the idols; and if the 
power of both shall be compared, I think they shall 
be found in all things equal, except that the god of 
bread is subject unto more dangers than were the 
idols of the Gentiles. Men made them ; men make 
it. They were deaf and dumb ; it cannot speak, hear, 
or see. Briefly, in infirmity they wholly agree, ex- 
cept that, as I have said, the poor god of bread is 
most miserable of all other idols ; for according to 
their matter whereof they are made, they will re- 
main without corruption for many years; but with- 
in one year that god will putrefy, and then he must 
be burned. They can abide the vehemency of the 
wind, frost, rain, or snow; but the wind will blow 
that god to sea, the rain or the snow will make it 
dough again ; yea (which is most of all to be feared), 
that god is a prey, if he be not well kept, to rats 
and mice, for they will desire no better dinner than 
white, round gods enow. But oh, then, what be- 
cometh of Christ's natural body? By miracle it 
flies to heaven again, if the Papists teach truly, for 



60 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

how soon soever the mouse takes hold, so soon flieth 
Christ away and letteth her gnaw the bread. A 
bold and puissant mouse, but a feeble and misera- 
ble god ! Yet would I ask a question : ' Whether 
hath the priest or the mouse greater power?' By 
his words it is made a god ; by her teeth it ceaseth 
to be a god. Let them advise and answer!" 

These sentences remind us of Latimer ; and there 
are many passages in his History of the Reformation 
which bubble over with humor of a similar kind ; 
80 that we may be sure that it found a way also 
even into his sermons ; and if it did, it is not diffi- 
cult to explain how "the common people heard him 
gladly." 

The doctrinal substance of his discourses was that 
which we now genprally associate with the name of 
Calvin, though he had attained to the perception 
and acceptance of it long before he came into per- 
sonal contact with the Genevese divine. He held 
fast by the Deity, atonement, and mediation of the 
Lord Jesus Christ. Luther did not proclaim the 
doctrine of justification by faith more energetically 
than he ; and in every appeal he made to his fellow- 
men they were sure to see that " Jesus " was " in 
the midst." He never put himself before his Mas- 



JOHN KNOX AS A PREACHER. 61 

ter, or sent Lis hearers away thinking more of him 
than of his message. He seemed always to be ab- 
sorbed in or carried away by his subject, and that 
is the explanation of the fervor of manner which 
characterized his deliver}'. Who has not read that 
graphic description of him in his last days by James 
Melville? He had been constrained to leave Edin- 
burgh for a season, and w T as living, in broken health, 
in St. Andrews, where Melville was at the time a 
student. Thus he writes: "I heard him (Knox) 
teach there the prophecies of Daniel that summer 
and the winter following. I had my pen and my 
little book, and took away such things as I could 
comprehend. In the opening up of his text he was 
moderate for the space of half an hour; but when 
he entered on application he made me so to shiver 
{scottice <grue') and tremble that I could not hold 
my pen to write. He was very weak. I saw him 
every day of his teaching go slowly and warily, 
with a fur of martens about his neck, a staff in the 
one hand, and good, godly Richard Ballantyne, his 
servant, holding up the other armpit {scottice ' ox- 
ter'), from the abbey to the parish kirk, and by 
the said Robert and another servant lifted up to 
the pulpit, where he behooved to lean at his first 



62 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

entrance, but before he had done with his sermon 
he was so active and vigorous that it seemed as if 
he would knock the pulpit in pieces (scottice 'ding 
the pulpit in blads') and flie out of it." * 

Here, then, were all the elements of pulpit pow- 
er, so far as they are human, namely, competent 
scholarship, careful preparation, scriptural exposi- 
tion, evangelical doctrine, plain speech, bold utter- 
ance, and impassioned fervor. And the effects pro- 
duced attest the reality of the power. At Berwick 
a great transformation came over the place as the 
result of his two years' ministry, and his effective- 
ness as a preacher, both there and in Newcastle, 
raised him to the position of a royal chaplain. 
Wherever he labored, indeed, his word was with 
power, and the English ambassador at the Court of 
Scotland was speaking of what he had himself seen 

* We hope none of our American readers will fall into the 
mistake of the Frenchman who thus ridiculously paraphrases 
Melville's words: "Old and broken down, and so helpless as 
to he hardly able to crawl along, he was raised to the pulpit 
by two zealous disciples, where he began his sermon with a fee- 
ble voice and slow action; but soon heating himself by the force 
of his passion and hatred, he bestirred himself like a madman. 
He broke his pulpit, and jumped into the midst of his auditors, 
transported by his violent declamation, and words still more 
violent."— &# M 'die's Life, p. 264 (note). 



JOHK KNOX AS A PREACHER. 63 

when he wrote to Cecil : " I assure you the voice of 
one man is able in an hour to put more life in us 
than six hundred trumpets continually blustering in 
our ears." But indeed the Reformation in Scot- 
land was itself very largely the result of his preach- 
ing. No doubt it was begun before he entered on 
the work, and there were others laboring as well as 
he ; but to him most of all are due the organization 
and conservation of the work in the formation of a 
National Church. By his ministry the entire face 
and future of Scotland were changed. She has 
made great progress in many directions since his 
day, and outgrown many of the limitations within 
which, perhaps, he w r ould have restricted her, but 
the success of his work made it possible for her to 
become what she is to-day. And it was as a preach- 
er mainly that he did his work. He was a states- 
man, indeed, as his great scheme of education clearly 
proves; and the fact that his advice was sought by 
multitudes in difficulties is an evidence that he was 
a man of wisdom. But though different excellen- 
cies might come out in him on different occasions, 
in the pulpit they were all in exercise and always 
at their best. That w r as the glass which focussed 
all his powers into a point, and quickened them into 



64 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

an intensity which kindled everything it touched. 
It brightened his intellect, enlivened his imagina- 
tion, clarified his judgment, inflamed his courage, 
and gave fiery energy to his utterance. He was 
never elsewhere so great in any one of these partic- 
ulars as he was when in the pulpit, in them all; for 
there, over and above the fervid animation which 
he had in such large measure, and the glow of en- 
thusiasm which fills the soul of the orator as he ad- 
dresses an audience, he had the feeling that he was 
called of God to be faithful, and that lifted him en- 
tirely out of himself. He spoke because he could 
not but speak; and his words went in to men. 
Like those modern missiles which burst within the 
wounds which they have made, so his words ex- 
jploded icithin the hearts of those who received 
them, and set them on fire with convictions that 
flamed forth in conduct. It was apparently impos- 
sible for any one to listen to him without being 
moved either to antagonism or to agreement, or — 
for he could be tender also — to tears. 

It may be said, indeed, that he allowed himself 
too great liberty in commenting in the pulpit on 
public men and national affairs ; and we may readi- 
ly admit that in ordinary times and under altered 



JOHN KNOX AS A PREACHER. 65 

circumstances it would be unwise in most preachers 
to do precisely as he did ; but we have to bear in 
mind that the crisis through which his country was 
passing at that time was as much religious as polit- 
ical, and that the pulpit was the only organ at his 
command. To his credit be it recorded, that he 
was, if not the first, at least among the very first to 
perceive the importance of making and guiding 
public opinion aright. He saw that the people were 
to be the ultimate arbiters of the great matters 
that were then in debate, and he was determined to 
reach them. But the daily press was not then born, 
few, comparatively speaking, could even read, so 
that pamphlets were of little use, and the public 
meeting had not yet come into existence. Only 
the pulpit was his, and so, by his five sermons a 
week in Edinburgh, and his frequent itinerancies 
through different parts of the country, he did what 
is now done by editors in their columns and by 
statesmen in their campaigns, and the like. He 
was not always wise, neither was he always discrim- 
inating in his utterances ; but he was always trans- 
parently honest, unflinchingly bold, and unselfishly 
patriotic; and when we add that all these qualities 
in him were raised to the white heat of enthusiasm, 



66 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

and fused into the unity of holiness by his devotion 
to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
we are at no loss to account for the magnitude of 
the work he did. He spoke and wrote and acted 
as ever in His sight; and more, perhaps, than any 
other man in modern history, he might have taken 
for the motto of his life the oft-repeated assevera- 
tion of Elijah, " As the Lord God of Israel liveth 
before whom I stand." This was the secret of his 
courage, the root of his inflexibility, and the source 
of his power. 

But now reverting to the statement with which 
I began, let me pause for a few moments longer to 
point out in what particulars especially the preach- 
ing of Knox impressed itself upon the pulpit of 
Scotland. It did so, pre-eminently, in these three : 
its expository character, its vehemence of manner, 
and its unflinching courage. 

To his example Scotland owes the custom ob- 
served by, I believe, the majority of its ministers, 
down even to the present day, of devoting at least 
one of the discourses of the Sabbath to the regular 
and consecutive exposition of some book of the 
Scriptures. In the hands, indeed, of those who have 
not had the diligence to go beneath the surface, or 



JOHN KNOX AS A PREACHER. 67 

the skill to make their work interesting, that meth- 
od has often degenerated into a mere apology for 
preaching, consisting of the Bible and water — most- 
ly water. But in Scotland, for the most part, it has 
been faithfully, laboriously, and acceptably done, 
and there can be no doubt that it has largely con- 
tributed to the Biblical intelligence both of minis- 
ters and people. I can remember how, in the home 
of my boyhood, it was my father's regular custom, 
on the morning of the first day of the week, to 
spend the time between family worship and the 
hour of public service in perusing a commentary 
on the passage which was to form the subject of 
exposition in the sanctuary, in order that he might 
be the better fitted to follow and appreciate the 
discourse which he expected from his pastor. A 
preparation that, much more w T holesome than the 
reading of the Sunday newspaper, which, alas ! has 
found its way into the homes of too many even of 
our church-members in these days. This regular 
exposition of the Scriptures in all the churches 
made the Bible the hand-book of the people. It 
made Scotland for long a nation of one book ; and 
if the man who may be so characterized is proverb- 
ially dangerous, it is not wonderful that the nation 



68 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

of whom that was true was terribly troublesome to 
such rulers as it had sometimes to deal w 7 ith ; for 
the Bible and despotism cannot long live together, 
and it is not usually the Bible that has to go. Thus 
expository preaching is good for the welfare of the 
nation as well as for the edification of the Christian, 
and it were well if some American Knox, by the 
influence of his instructive and successful example, 
could bring it back to the pulpits of our land. 

Not less potent on the Scottish ministry as a 
whole was Knox's influence in the department of 
manner. It is difficult, indeed, for one now, as he 
reads that sermon which so enraged Darnley, to un- 
derstand how it could be delivered in a frenzy 
like that which James Melville has described. It 
is not nearly so strong in its language as are many 
other separate passages which have been preserved 
in other parts of his writings, and as we peruse it 
now it seems calm enough. But probably the man- 
ner overawed Darnley, and communicated itself to 
the matter, making it like red-hot shot, and putting 
more into the words than without it they would 
have conveyed. Perhaps this will account also for 
the fact that Knox's repetition in the palace to 
Queen Mary of a sermon which he had preached 



JOHN KNOX AS A PREACHER. 69 

the previous day in the cathedral did not seem, 
even to her, to warrant the assertions which had 
been made to her concerning it by those who had 
heard it the day before in public, for the vehe- 
mence of the pulpit would be wanting in the par- 
lor. But if that be, indeed, the explanation, it 
only shows how important the manner is ; and in 
any case the same contrast between the calmness 
of the printed page and the passion of delivery 
which we read of in Knox reappeared in Kuther- 
furd and Chalmers, and repeats itself to-day in such 
living preachers as Cairns and Caird. But it would 
be wrong to regard it as a mannerism, which is 
either artificially acquired by the man himself or 
capable of imitation by another. Whatever you 
may call it — jprcefervidum ingenium, or whatever 
else — it is certainly not a mere external thing. It 
is as far removed from that gesticulation which an 
old friend of mine used to call "arm-work" as it 
is from " the stare and start theatric practised at 
the glass." It is nothing short of a " possession " 
of the man for the time being by the Spirit of his 
utterance, so that without any consciousness on his 
part of what he is doing it speaks through him — 
that is, not through his words only, but through his 



70 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

entire personality — and bears him along as with an 
overflowing flood. But, alas! with too many of 
us the sermon does not possess even the voice — 
perhaps because there is no spirit in it to become a 
possessor, for that is the first requisite, and where 
that is wanting we may say as the servant of Elijah 
did, when he looked so often vainly for the cloud, 
" There is nothing." But w 7 hen a preacher is, like 
Knox, sermon -possessed, the vehemence will seem 
to be so natural that it will be lost sight of in the 
experience of the power of which it is the concom- 
itant, and this has been true of all the best preach- 
ers in the land of Knox. 

Finally, the courage of Knox seems to have been 
for an inspiration to all the noblest ministers of 
Scotland. In him the independence of the nation 
was sublimed, elevated, and glorified by Christian 
faith. Morton said of him with truth that he 
"never feared the face of man." But James the 
Sixth might have said the same of Andrew Mel- 
ville ; Charles the First might have repeated the 
words over Alexander Henderson ; and Richard 
Cameron, whose blood reddened " the wild and lone 
Airdsmoss," needs nothing more than such a death 
to testify to his dauntless utterance of what he be- 



JOHN KNOX AS A PREACHER. 71 

lieved to be true. There have been, no doubt, in 
Scotland, as elsewhere, degenerate men, who trim- 
med their sails to every breeze, and always faithful- 
ly consulted their own safety and interest, but still 
the noble example of Knox has animated and in- 
fluenced the Scottish ministry all along, and his 
name yet stirs the heart and quickens the pulses 
of a Caledonian with an enthusiasm akin to that 
with which he hears those of Wallace and Bruce. 

I have somewhere read of a political party who 
wished to carry their purposes by all sorts of means, 
and as one of these, endeavored by corrupting the 
clergy to get them to support their views. This 
they called " tuning the pulpits" But in a far 
nobler sense, and in a manner at once pure and 
lofty, Knox may be said to have "tuned" the 
pulpits of his nation, for he struck the key-note to 
which — however much, sometimes, it may have been 
drowned by noisy clamor, or may have seemed to 
become faint and almost inaudible — all that is best 
in the preaching of Scotland to this hour has been 
harmonious and true. Would God that it might 
be heard here among you to-day with similar ef- 
fect on your life-work in this land ! 



III. 

MELVILLE.— RUTHERFURD.— DICKSON*.— LIVINGSTONE. 

The greatest names in the history of the Scot- 
tish Church between the death of Knox and the 
Revolution-settlement were those of Andrew Mel- 
ville, Alexander Henderson, Samuel Ruther- 
furd, and Robert Leighton; though the last be- 
longed to the mediating party who sought to in- 
tervene between the extreme doctrinaires on either 
side, and thus occupied a position different from 
that of all the rest. Some of the field-preachers, 
too, in the time of persecution deserve to be held 
in honorable remembrance, and must in no wise 
be overlooked ; but in the main the historv of the 
times, ecclesiastically considered, might be written 
in the biographies of those whom we have named. 

With Andrew Melville we have comparatively 
little to do here, since his work was more that of 
the Educational Reformer and Ecclesiastical States- 
man than of the Pulpit orator, and he was a 
preacher for but little more than three years. Still, 



MELVILLE. 73 

as he undeniably influenced the pulpit of his coun- 
try through his prelections as a theological instruc- 
tor both in the University of Glasgow and in that 
of St. Andrews, we cannot pass him altogether by in 
silence. He was a younger son of a landed proprie- 
tor in Angus who perished at the battle of Pinkie 
while Andrew was yet a boy. After receiving 
what education the Academy of Montrose and the 
University of St. Andrews could then furnish, the 
lad w T ent to Paris, where he studied for two years. 
Thence he removed to Poitiers, where, though then 
only twenty-one years of age, he was made one of 
the Eegents of the College of St. Marceon. Here 
he remained for three years, and thence he removed 
to Geneva, w T here through the recommendation of 
Beza he was appointed Professor of Latin, an office 
which he held for five } r ears. On his return to 
Scotland, in 1574, two years after the death of 
Knox; he was almost immediately appointed Prin- 
cipal of the University of Glasgow, where he in- 
augurated and carried out such reforms, alike in 
the subjects taught and the manner of the teach- 
ing, that his nephew alleges, with perhaps a little 
natural if not national exaggeration, that " there was 
no place in Europe comparable to Glasgow for good 



74 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

letters daring these years — for a plentiful and good 
cheap market of all kinds of languages, arts, and 
sciences."* 

In conjunction with the office of Principal of 
the University he held that of pastor of the neigh- 
boring parish of Govan for three years, and that 
was the only portion of his life during which he 
regularly occupied a pulpit. In 1580 he w r as re- 
moved to St. Andrews, where he carried out the 
same educational improvements as he had inaugu- 
rated in Glasgow ; and after having experienced in 
many forms the penalty of opposing King James 
in his darling project of fastening Episcopacy on 
Scotland, he was imprisoned for wellnigh four 
years in the Tower of London. On his liberation 
he went to France, where he was appointed to a 
chair in the Protestant College of Sedan, and where 
he died in 1622 at the advanced age of seventy- 
seven. 

The Second Book of Discipline, which is still 
of force in the Church of Scotland, is supposed 
to have come mainly from his hand. He was a 
ripe, and for these times a rare, scholar. In general 

* See McCrie's "Life of Andrew Melville/' p. 33. 



MELVILLE. 75 

literature he had few equals, and in the composi- 
tion of Latin poetry he had no superior. He was 
the first to introduce the study of Greek into the 
Scottish universities, and his Hebrew Bible was 
his constant companion. He clearly saw and freely 
said that the words npzefivrtpog and ^itlgkoitoq are 
used interchangeably in the New Testament, and in 
that all modern scholars will agree with him ; but 
when he went so far as to allege the absolute Jus 
Divinum of Presbytery, in such a sense that every 
other form of Church government is contrary to 
the Word of God, few even among Presbyterians 
themselves will now care to follow him. Yet his in- 
fluence, more perhaps than that of any other single 
individual, gave currency to that opinion, so that 
there is a measure of truth in the saying that " Knox 
made Scotland Protestant, but Melville made it 
Presbyterian." His teachings and efforts, therefore, 
gave intensity to the struggle between the king 
and those who, as every one must allow, formed the 
more spiritual party in the Church. He was a 
brave, uncompromising, heroic man, and some of 
his sayings at critical times in his history became 
watchwords to those who came after him in the 
conflicts of that stirring and controversial age. Like 



76 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

those of Luther, they were in themselves " half-bat- 
tles," or rather, perhaps, to put it more strongly, 
"half- victories" — for those who rallied to them 
were on the way to success. 

One or two examples may here be given. When 
Morton, who was then Regent of the Kingdom, in- 
dignant at something which Melville had said, re- 
marked, in a most suggestive manner, " There will 
never be quietness in this country till half a dozen 
of 3'ou be hanged or banished from the land," Mel- 
ville replied, "Tush, sir, threaten your purple min- 
ions after that manner. It is all one to me whether 
I rot in the air or in the ground. The earth is 
the Lord's : Patria est tibicunque est bene, I have 
been ready to give my life where it would not have 
been half so well sacrificed at the pleasure of my 
God. I have lived out of your country ten years 
as well as in it. Let God be glorified ; it will not 
be in your power to hang in exile His truth." * 

On another occasion he was sent by the General 
Assembly as one of a deputation to lay a certain 
remonstrance before the king; and when the pa- 
pers were read to the assembled council, the Earl 

* McCrie's "Life of Andrew Melville," p. G9. 



MELVILLE. 77 

of Arran exclaimed, in a tone of indignation, " Who 
dares subscribe these treasonable articles ?" where- 
upon Melville calmly answered, " We dare," and at 
once took the pen and appended his name. Again, 
in 1596, when a number of the clergy were admit- 
ted to an audience with the monarch, and his Maj- 
esty had accused them of holding seditious meet- 
ings (for so he characterized the meetings of the 
Church for its own purposes), and of alarming the 
country without reason, Melville was moved to 
speak after this fashion : " Sir, we will always hum- 
bly reverence your Majesty in public, but since we 
have this occasion to be with your Majesty in pri- 
vate, and since you are brought in extreme danger, 
both of your life and crown, and along with you 
the country and the Church of God are like to go 
to wreck for not telling you the truth and giving 
you faithful counsel, we must discharge our duty, 
or else be traitors both to Christ and you. There- 
fore, sir, as diverse times before I have told you, so 
now again I must tell you, there are two kings and 
two kingdoms in Scotland ; there is King James, 
the head of this Commonwealth, and there is Christ 
Jesus, the King of the Church, whose subject James 
the Sixth is, and of whose kingdom he is not a 



78 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member. . . . We 
will yield to you your place, and give you all due 
obedience ; but again I say, you are not the head 
of the Church ; you cannot give us that eternal life 
which we seek for even in this world, and you can- 
not deprive us of it. Permit us then freely to meet 
in the name of Christ, and to attend to the in- 
terests of that Church of which you are the chief 
member." * This has been called Hildebrandism 
by Dean Stanley ; and even Cunningham is disposed 
to look at it in that light. To my view, however, 
what Melville argued for was not the subjection of 
the State to the Church, but the autonomy of the 
Church in the State. 

I should not be disposed to stand sponsor for all 
Melville's opinions, but in this scene and those oth- 
ers of which I have spoken he seems to me to take 
his place with Luther, Latimer, and other witness- 
es for liberty of conscience, and for the spiritual 
independence of the Church of Christ, which is 
"the freest society in the world." The spirit of 
Knox lived over again in Melville. He knew no 
fear. Opposition only stimulated him to his full- 

* McCrie's "Sketches of Scottish Church History," vol. i., 
p. 125. 



HENDERSON. 79 

est strength. It whetted his speech and gave edge 
to his temper: though there was genius and some- 
thing more in the reply which he gave to one who 
blamed him for being too fiery, when he said, "If 
you see my fire go downward, set your foot on 
it and put it out; but if it go upward, let it go 
to its own place." * Such a man would be sure to 
make deep and indelible impressions on his students. 
His positivism would be to many in the place of per- 
sonal conviction, and his enthusiasm would kindle 
in them all a kindred flame, so that though he was 
not himself, for any length of time, a preacher, he 
must have preached through them for years after he 
had been driven into exile. Even yet there come 
from his words sparks enough to kindle our souls 
into eager loyalty to Christ, and that is greatness ; 
wherever and howsoever it may be manifested. 

Alexander Henderson, the next after Melville 
in the Scottish Evangelical Succession, w r as, in the 
earlier part of his life, less a man of affairs than the 
exile of Sedan, but he was more distinctively a 
preacher. Born in 1583, in the county of Fife, he 

* McCrie's "Sketches of Scottish Church History," vol. i., 
p. 126. 



80 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

was educated at the University of St. Andrews, 
where, after his graduation, he was chosen to a pro- 
fessorship of Philosophy and Rhetoric, which he 
held about eight years. In 1612 he received from 
Gladstanes, Archbishop of St. Andrews, a presenta- 
tion to the neighboring parish of Leuchars. He was 
at that time a strenuous supporter of the Episcopal 
innovations, and his settlement was so utterly op- 
posed to the will of the people that on the day of 
his ordination they had nailed up the doors of the 
church, and the clergy who were to take part in the 
ceremonies had to enter the building through one 
of the windows. Shortly afterwards, however, an 
entire change was wrought, in a way quite remark- 
able, upon his convictions. Hearing that one of the 
evangelical ministers, Robert Bruce, of Kinnaird, 
who had then great reputation as a preacher, was to 
occupy the pulpit of a parish church not far away, 
he went tinder some sort of disguise and seated 
himself in an obscure corner of the building to 
hear him. When the text, which happened to be, 
" Verily, verily, I say unto you. He that entereth not 
by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up 
some other way, the same is a thief and a robber," 
was given out, the words, so descriptive of his 



HENDERSON. 81 

own settlement at Leuchars, went, as he afterwards 
said, " like drawn swords " into his heart. The ser- 
mon which followed was a message from God to 
him, and resulted not only in the alteration of his 
views on ecclesiastical principles, but also in his 
true conversion to Christ,* From this time on till 
1637 he lived in retirement, faithfully discharging 
the duties of his office, and diligently prosecuting 
the study of theology ; although even then he must 
have been known for his defence of what he held 
to be right, since one of Eutherf urd's letters, dated 
in the year which I have just specified, indicates 
that multitudes were looking to him to become 
their leader. Jfor did they look in vain, for when 
the stool of Jenny Geddes ignited the match which 
set the land aflame, he came at once to the front. 
His hand drafted the additions to the old covenant 
of 1581, which made it into the National Covenant 
of 1638 — a covenant the signing of which in the 
Greyfriars Church and church -yard on the after- 
noon of a chill February day is one of the most 
memorable scenes in Scottish history. 

Two years later he was called from his rural 

* See McCrie's "Sketches of Scottish Church History," ubi 
mpra, vol. i., pp. 218, 219. 
4* 



82 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

retreat to the pastorate of that same Greyfriars 
Church, which he continued to hold until his death. 
He filled many important offices: was moderator 
of the General Assembly more than once on criti- 
cal occasions ; was repeatedly sent as representative 
of the ministers to King Charles the First; and 
was perhaps the leading member of the delegation 
of six commissioners sent from Scotland to the 
Westminster Assembly of Divines. He died im- 
mediately after his return from a conference with 
the king at Newcastle, in 1646, and was buried in 
that old church-yard to which the feet of so many 
pilgrims are still attracted in the Scottish metrop- 
olis. At the Restoration of Charles the Second 
the representatives of that party whose adherents 
disentombed the bones of Cromwell, paid Hen- 
derson the compliment of effacing the inscription 
from his monument ; but it was renewed at the 
Revolution, and even if it had not been so, he 
had graven his name too deeply in the annals of 
his nation for it ever to be forgotten. 

During his lifetime he published three of his 
sermons; and so lately as 1838 a volume of dis- 
courses and prayers, apparently taken down from 
his lips by some admirer, was given to the press 



HENDERSON. 83 

by the discoverer of the manuscript. These are 
exceedingly interesting, as showing not only the 
order of service which was then common among 
the Scottish Presbyterians, but also as giving a 
specimen of the ordinary weekly work of this dis- 
tinguished man. Some of the sermons belong to 
a course which he w T as evidently delivering on 
the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the He- 
brews, while there are others which as clearly 
formed part of a series on the Christian armor as 
described by Paul in the Epistle to the Ephesians, 
giving thus incidental corroboration to the state- 
ment which I have already made concerning the 
expository character of Scottish preaching. In 
their framework they are strictly textual, and in 
their substance practical rather than doctrinal. 
Like all the sermons of that period, they are too 
largely broken up into minute subdivisions, al- 
though they do not err in that respect so griev- 
ously as those of the Puritans. They contain 
numerous allusions to the questions and circum- 
stances of the times, but even when dealing with 
these their language, though strong, is never bit- 
ter or envenomed. They were manifestly deliv- 
ered without notes, but they were just as mani- 



84 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

festly the fruit of careful study, and they were 
probably fully written out beforehand, but whether 
they were verbally memorized there is no evi- 
dence to show. Their style is simple, sometimes 
almost conversational, and frequently vernacular, 
but in matter they are always rich in " that 
which is good to the use of edifying, that it may 
minister grace unto the hearers." The prayers 
are particularly noteworthy for their simplicity, 
directness, and comprehensiveness, and for the 
pleading pathos, as of a son with a father, by 
which they are pervaded. 

But though his ordinary work was thus excellent, 
Henderson seems to have been the great man of his 
day in Scotland for special occasions. When any- 
thing was to be done which required peculiar wis- 
dom, calmness, dignity, and power, he was sure to 
be selected for the purpose, and he never failed. 
His prayer at the signing of the Covenant in Grey- 
friars Church is characterized as " sublime," though 
doubtless some of the sublimity was in the occasion 
itself; for in a city to which sixty thousand people 
had flocked from all parts of the country, and in 
a pulpit which was surrounded by a dense crowd 
that overflowed into and filled the church -yard, 



HENDERSON. 85 

there were already the influences out of which 
such prayers as that of Solomon at the Dedica- 
tion of the Temple are born. They get as much 
from the occasion as they give to it, yet when one 
and another and another came forth immediately 
after to write their names in their own blood, and 
some appended the words " till death," we may 
not doubt that the rapt fervor of the holy sup- 
plication in which they had just been led by Hen- 
derson had much to do with their enthusiasm. His 
sermon at the opening of the memorable Assembly 
in Glasgow in 1638, though hastily prepared, is full 
of condensed power; and the words with which he 
dismissed that convocation, after it had formally de- 
molished Episcopacy in the Scottish Church, were 
often afterwards remembered ; for he said,with some- 
thing like the sternness, and the prescience, too, of 
an old Hebrew prophet, " We have now cast down 
the walls of Jericho ; let him that rebuildeth them 
beware of the curse of Hiel the Bethelite." 

As a speaker, though Clarendon characterizes his 
style as "flat and insipid," he must have been ex- 
ceedingly effective, since the same historian avers 
that the king well knew Henderson to be " the prin- 
cipal engine by which the whole nation was moved." 



86 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

In the judgment of others less prejudiced against 
him, his speech was " quiet, grave, and weighty, yet 
easy and fluent." He was a ready debater, as the 
records of the Westminster Assembly show; and 
we may well believe that he would not have been 
selected to make one of the addresses before the 
Houses of Parliament and the Assembly of Divines, 
when they adopted the Solemn League and Cove- 
nant, if he had not been regarded as one of the 
most prominent orators of his time. The following 
extract from the discourse he made on that occasion 
will give a good idea of the stately march of his 
words and the solid weight of his ideas. Bear in 
mind, as I read, that the Solemn League was direct- 
ed against Popery as well as Prelacy, and that the 
latter was regarded as particularly odious, not only 
in itself, but also and especially as leading on to the 
former : 

" Had the Pope at Rome the knowledge of what 
is doing this day in England, and were this Cove- 
nant written on the plaster of the wall over against 
him, where he sitteth Belshazzar-like in his sacri- 
legious pomp, it would make his heart to tremble, 
his countenance to change, his head and mitre to 
shake, his joints to loose, and all his cardinals and 



HENDERSON. 87 

prelates to be astonished. The Word of God is for 
it, as you have been now resolved, by the testimony 
of a reverend assembly of so many godly, learned, 
and great divines. In your own sense and expe- 
rience j 7 ou will find that although while you are as- 
saulted with worldly cares and fears your thoughts 
may somewhat trouble you, yet at other times, when 
upon seeking God in private or in public, as in the 
evening of a well-spent Sabbath, your disposition is 
more spiritual, and, leaving the world behind you, 
you have found access unto God through Jesus 
Christ, then the bent of your hearts will be strong- 
est to go through with this good work. It is a good 
testimony that our designs and ways are agreeable 
to God if we affect them most when our hearts are 
farthest from the world, and our temper is most 
spiritual and heavenly, and least carnal and earthly. 
As the Word of God, so the prayers of the people 
of God in all the reformed churches are for us 
and on our side. It wer§ more terrible than an 
army to hear that there were any fervent supplica- 
tions to God against us. Blasphemies, curses, and 
horrid imprecations there be, proceeding from an- 
other spirit, and that is all." 

After reading that passage we are prepared for 



88 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

the statement of Grainger, who says of Henderson : 
"Learned, eloquent, and polite, and perfectly versed 
in the knowledge of mankind, he knew how to rouse 
the people to war or to negotiate a peace. When- 
ever he preached it was to crowded audiences, and 
when he pleaded or argued he was regarded with 
mute attention." To which I would only add that 
his knowledge of the Bible was equal, if not supe- 
rior, to his knowledge of men. He seemed to be 
able to lay his hand on Scriptural illustrations just 
as he required them, and there is always a certain 
" curiosa felicitas" in his allusions to the characters 
in the Word of God, and in his quotations from it, 
w r hieh only absolute familiarity with it can account 
for. In this respect, perhaps, he is most worthy of 
imitation by the preachers of to-day. 

Samuel. Eutderfurd, the next great preacher on 
our list, was born in Roxburghshire about the year 
1600, and educated at the University of Edinburgh, 
which he entered in 1617, and from which he re- 
ceived the degree of M. A. in 1621. He held the 
office of Regent and instructor in Latin in the same 
institution for two years, and then gave himself to 
the study of theology. He was ordained in " An- 



RUTHERFURD. 89 

wotli by the Sol way " in 1627, and labored there till 
1636, when, having given offence to the Bishop of 
Galloway by his utterances in ecclesiastical matters, 
and by the publication of a work against Arminian- 
ism, he was removed from his parish and ordered 
by the authorities to confine himself within the lim- 
its of the city of Aberdeen.- There he remained 
for nearly two years, silenced, indeed, as a preacher, 
but writing those letters which, more than anything 
else he ever said or did, have preserved his name 
until this day. In February, 1638, he returned to 
Anwoth for a brief space, but the famous General 
Assembly of that year appointed him Professor of 
Theology in St. Andrews, to which office, as w T ell as 
that of assistant pastor of the parish church of that 
city, he was installed in the beginning of the follow- 
ing year. In 1643 he was sent to London as one of 
the commissioners to the Westminster Assembly, 

* A natural mistake is very commonly made in regard to 
this matter, from the fact that in his letters Rutherfurd so fre- 
quently speaks of his ''prison," and of himself as "a prisoner," 
but he was never in prison, in the strict sense of that term. He 
was banished to the city of Aberdeen, and was restricted within 
its limits, much as Shimei was by Solomon in Jerusalem. He 
could go where he pleased within the city, but was prohibited 
from going beyond it, and was not allowed to exercise his min- 
istry in any form. 



90 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

whence four years afterwards he returned to St. An- 
drews, and there he died in 1661. We have not to 
do with him here as a man or as an author, but as a 
preacher,* yet it is scarcely possible for us to ig- 
nore the two former in the third ; and when we in- 
clude them we are at once startled and perplexed, 
for I frankly confess that no character even in that 
stormy time seems to me so difficult to regard as a 
unit as that of Kutherfurd. There were two men 
in him, and the two were so distinct that you could 
hardly call him a "strange mixture," for they did 
not mix. The one of them seemed to have no ef- 
fect in conditioning or qualifying the other, but 
each was just as unshaded by the other as if it had 
stood alone. His letters rank in the literature of 
devotion with the " Confessions " of Augustine or 
the "Imitation" of Thomas a Kempis. One not 
given to exaggeration has described them as "unsur- 
passed in holy rapture, breathing a spirit of such 
devotion as if he had been a seraph incarnate, and 
filled with such joyous transport as if he had been 

* For an exhaustive list of Kutherfurd's theological works, 
and a most judicial estimate of their value, see " The Theology 
and Theologians of Scotland," chiefly of the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries, by James Walker, D.D. ; The Cunning- 
ham Lectures for 1870-71, pp. 8-12. 



RUTHERFURD. 91 

caught up into the third heaven, and his heart yet 
throbbed with the unearthly sensation." * There is 
perhaps a little too much of the luscious, and he 
treats the marriage of the soul to God, which seems 
to be the central idea of his experimental theology, 
with a realism like that of the Song of Solomon. 
But the consolatory epistles are especially delight- 
ful, and the book keeps its place to this day as one 
of the classics of the closet, despite, or perhaps in 
consequence of, its leaning to the mystical. Rich- 
ard Baxter, who was far from agreeing with all 
Rutherfurd's opinions, said of the Letters, "Hold 
off the Bible, such a book the world never saw the 
like;" and Richard Cecil said of him, "He is one of 
my classics, he is a real original." But his contro- 
versial works are often rabid and bitter in the ex- 
treme. Dr. Grosartf has said that in them "you 
have, speaking generally, such assumption of per- 
sonal infallibility, such fierceness of contradiction, 
such unmeasured vituperation, such extreme narrow- 
ness of sectarian orthodoxy, and such suspicion of 
all who differed from him, as is alike wonderful and 

* Dr. John Eadie, in "Mackenzie's Biographical Dictionary." 
f "Representative Nonconformists, " p. 202. Alexander B. 
Grosart, LL.D. 



92 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

sorrowful." Apparently he could not put himself 
into the place of another, so as to see things from 
his angle or understand his position ; and though 
there may be truth in the traditional story which 
tells of his entertaining Archbishop Usher unawares, 
and hearing from his lips of the eleventh command- 
ment,* to wit, " A new commandment give I unto 
you, that ye have love one toward another," he 
seems to have very frequently ignored his obliga- 
tion to obey it. "With him there was only one side 
to every question, and that one his own and God's, 
to oppose which was flat blasphemy and impiety. 
He could make no distinction between essentials 
and non-essentials ; the form of Church government 
was in his view of as much importance as the deity 
of Christ ; and what he judged to be right was so 
infallibly right that all men were bound to conform 
thereto. It was such disputants as he who drew 
from Cromwell the, for him, mild remonstrance, 
"I beseech you in the bowels of Christ think it 
possible that you may be mistaken ;" and there is 
special reference to him by Milton in that scathing 
sonnet, in the body of which are these lines : 

* Sec Note at the end of this lecture. 



RUTHERFURD. 93 

"Dare ye for this adjure the civil sword 

To force our consciences that Christ set free, 
And rule us with a Classic Hierarchy- 
Taught ye by mere A. S. and Rutherfurd?" 

And which concludes with the stinging words, 
" New Presbyter is but old Priest y writ large." 

This, then, was the Janus — the two men in one — 
called Samuel Rutherfurd. To borrow the illustra- 
tion of Mr. Innes, " It was St. Thomas and St. 
Francis under one hood," and the intensity behind 
them made both of these the strongest of their 
kind* 

Such being the case, both would get into his ser- 
mons, though, except when he made some " neces- 
sary digressions for the times," as he called them, 
the venom of his controversial nature did not in- 
trude. At Anwoth, to which his heart always leaped 
back with a peculiar affection, he was the most dil- 
igent of pastors. Men said of him there : " He 
seemed to be always praying, always preaching, al- 
ways visiting the sick, always catechising, always 

* By far the finest sketch of Rutherfurd that we have seen 
is that of Mr. Taylor Innes, from which we have just quoted, 
and which is to be found in "The Evangelical Succession/' 
Second Series, pp. 127-172. As a piece of historical criticism 
and spiritual discrimination it is wellnigh unequalled. 



94 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

writing and studying." It was his joy to preach 
Christ to his hearers. During his banishment to 
Aberdeen the silence which was imposed upon him 
was his heaviest cross, and some of the allusions in 
his letters to his pulpit and parish work are exceed- 
ingly pathetic, e. g. : " I am for the present thinking 
the sparrows and swallows that build their nests at 
Anwoth blessed birds ;" and again, " Oh ! if I might 
but speak to three or four herd-boys of my worthy 
Master, I w r ould be satisfied to be the meanest and 
most obscure of all the pastors in this land, and to 
live in any place, in any of Christ's basest out- 
houses." Such was his earnestness for the good of 
his people that he declares " his soul was taken up, 
when others were sleeping, how to have Christ be- 
trothed with a bride in that part of the land ;" and 
that "he wrestled with the angel and prevailed, and 
woods and trees and meadows and hills were his 
witnesses that he drew on a fair match (marriage) 
betwixt Christ and Anwoth." 

In the writings of his contemporaries, and those 
who immediately followed them, we get some in- 
teresting glimpses of the preacher and his manner. 
Thus Patrick Simpson says, " He had two quick eyes, 
and when he walked it was observed that he held 



RUTHERFURD. 95 

aye his face upward and heavenward. He had a 
strange utterance in the pulpit ; a kind of shriech 
(shriek or scream) that I never heard the like of. 
Many times I thought he would have flow r n out of 
the pulpit when he came to speak of Jesus Christ, 
and he never was in his right element but when he 
was commending him." * An English merchant, 
daring the Protectorate, describing some of his expe- 
riences in what was probably a business tour through 
Scotland, said,f " I went to St. Andrews, where I 
heard a sweet, majestic-looking man (Blair), and he 
showed me the majesty of God ; after him I heard 
a little fair man (Rutherfurd), and he showed me 
the loveliness of Christ; I then went to Irvine, 
where I heard a well-formed, proper old man, with a 
long beard (Dickson), and that man showed me all 
my own heart." That was a very remarkable and 
a most accurate discrimination ; so accurate that, as 
Wodrow says, " the whole General Assembly could 
not have given a better character of the three men." 
The ideal preacher, no doubt, should combine the 
three in himself; yet we may not refuse the palm 
to him who dwelt upon the loveliness of Christ, for 

* Quoted by McCrie in his " Sketches," vol. ii., p. 64. 
t Ibid., pp. 61, 62. 



96 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

that in the end will lead to the discovery of the 
other two. £fow that was Butherfurd's distinctive 
excellence in the pulpit. He might and did deal 
with other themes, but these he only possessed; this 
one, on the contrary, possessed him, and whenever 
he entered upon it he was carried away with it. 
We read that, " One day when preaching in Edin- 
burgh, after dwelling for some time on the differ- 
ences of the day, he broke out with ' Woe is unto 
us for these sad divisions that make us lose the fair 
scent of the Rose of Sharon ;' and then he went on 
commending Christ, going over all his precious 
styles and titles about a quarter of an hour, 5 ' upon 
which one of his hearers said in a loud whisper, 
" Ay, now you are right ; hold y ou there." * Gro- 
sart says of his practical discourses that their one 
merit is " that they are full of the exceeding great 
and precious promises and truths of the Gospel," 
and that "they hold forth with wistful <and passion- 
ate entreaty a crucified Saviour as the one centre 
for weary souls in their unrest, and the one hope 
for the world." f But, after all, is not that the " one 
thing needful" in all preaching? And it is for that 

* McCrie's " Sketches," vol. ii., p. 64. 

f "Representative Nonconf omiists, " pp. 199, 200. 



DICKSON. 97 

especially that I would hold him up for an inspira- 
tion to you. Like him, preach the living, personal 
Christ, once crucified, but now risen and reigning as 
the Saviour and Sovereign of men. Unfold His 
loveliness. Proclaim His merits. Hold up Himself. 
Let the truth which you declare be the truth as it 
is in Him. Let the faith to which you urge be faith 
in Him. Let the loyalty which you enforce be loy- 
alty to Him. Let the heaven winch you hold before 
your hearers be to be with Him, and to be like Him. 
" Hold you there," and let your words be such as 
love to Him shall inspire, then you shall not lack 
hearers, and shall not need to lament the absence of 
results. But with all this forget not the " eleventh 
commandment," and be sure to cultivate the grace 
of charity. 

Two other names belonging to this period cannot 
be overlooked. The first is that of David Dick- 
son, who has been already incidentally alluded to in 
the report of the English merchant as the preach- 
er "who showed him all his own heart." While 
Eutherfurd was prosecuting his pastoral work at 
Anwoth, Dickson was similarly engaged in the 
little Ayrshire town of Irvine, where his name is 
5 



98 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

still held in loving and honorable remembrance. 
Born in 1583, and educated at the University of 
Glasgow, of which, immediately after his gradua- 
tion, he became one of the regents or professors in 
philosophy, he was ordained at Irvine in 1618, and 
there he continued to exercise his ministry until, 
like Eutherf urd, he was banished to Aberdeenshire 
for his opposition to the Episcopalian innovations. 
Ultimately, however, he was restored to his parish, 
where he remained until he was made Professor of 
Theology, first in Glasgow and afterwards in Ed- 
inburgh. But on his refusal at the Eestoration to 
take the oath of supremacy he was ejected from his 
office, and he died in 1663. He was of a poetical 
temperament, for it is to him we owe the modern 
version of the popular hymn, " O mother dear, Je- 
rusalem," and that quality no doubt lent a charm to 
his discourses. But their chief attraction was their 
simple, earnest, evangelic teaching. Unlike those 
who were in the habit of exhausting both a text 
and their hearers by a series of twenty or thirty 
sermons on one passage of Scripture, he generally 
took three or four verses for a single discourse, say- 
ing that " God's bairns should get a good blaud " 
(that is, lump) " of his own bread." He compared 



DICKSON. 99 

a man's taking a text to his going to a tree and 
shaking its branches, so that the ripest of the fruit 
fell, while that which was green remained ; and he 
did not think it wise to take from a text all at once 
everything which it contained.* His discourses 
were expository in their framework, evidently the 
fruit of study, characterized by great simplicity, 
and glowing with earnestness. As one of his biog- 
raphers has said : 

"An apostolic brevity and simplicity in preaching 
was what this good man not only cultivated in him- 
self but cordially recommended to others, and that, 
too, in a style which they were not likely to forget. 
That parade of extensive reading, therefore, which 
indulges itself in showing all the different meanings 
of the text before coming to the true one, he justly 
condemned. ' This,' he said, c was just like a cook 
bringing up a piece of meat to the table, and saying, 
" This is a good piece of meat, but you must not 
taste it," and then he brings another and says the 
same. The cook,' he added, 'should bring them 



* For these and other particulars concerning Dickson I am 
indebted to a sketch of his life prefixed to the first volume of 
" Select Writings of Dickson," published by the Committee of 
the Free Church Assembly, 1845. 



100 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

no meat but what they are to eat.' In the same 
strain of honest-hearted humor he condemned the 
use of Latin sentences and scholastic phraseology 
before a simple auditory. 'It is/ he said, 'as if a 
cook should bring up the spit and raxes to the ta- 
ble ; these are fit to be kept in the kitchen, to make 
ready the meat, but they are. not to be brought to 
the table.' " * 

The simplicity of Dickson's discourses, therefore, 
was not for lack of depth. It was the result of his 
determination to be thoroughly understood. While 
he was in Aberdeenshire he was, unlike Eutherfurd, 
permitted to preach, but he found the people there 
so ignorant and degraded that he had to subject 
himself to a laborious course of preparation so as 
to reach down to them in order that he might raise 
them up. He was wont afterwards to say that the 
people in the North were much worse than the 
people in the West — for studying one day would 
have served him at Irvine, but it required two days 
of studying for preaching at Turiff. Remember 
that, please, whenever you are tempted to think 
that because an audience is rude and uncultivated 

* Memoir of Dickson, prefixed to " Select Writings of Dick- 
son," p r xxx. 



DICKSON. 101 

you may speak to it without any great forethought, 
for it takes labor to be simple. 

It is in connection with Dickson's ministry that 
we come upon what in our days would be called 
a great revival, which lasted for five years, and 
which was accompanied by singular manifestations 
of Divine power. It began just after his return 
from his banishment, when his own heart was en- 
joying the "afterward" of the great trial through 
which he had been brought, and it may be regarded 
as an illustration of the fact that the affliction of 
a pastor issues often in the spiritual profit of his 
people. Fleming, in his " Fulfilling of the Script- 
ures," speaks of that great awakening in these 
terms : " By the profane rabble of that time it was 
called, ' The Stewarton sickness,' for in that parish 
first, but afterwards through much of that country, 
particularly at Irvine, under the ministry of Mr. 
Dickson, where it can be said (which divers min- 
isters and Christians yet alive can witness) that for 
a considerable time few Sabbaths did pass with- 
out some evidently converted, or some convincing 
proof of the power of God accompanying his word. 
And truly this great spring-tide, as I may call it, of 
the Gospel was not of a short time, but of some 



102 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

years' continuance . . . which put a marvellous lustre 
on these parts of the country, the same whereof 
brought many from other parts of the land to see 
its truth." * But Dickson — and to this I call your 
special attention — was as remarkable for his learn- 
ing as for his fervor and simplicity in the pulpit. 
Many speak now as if, like Saul's armor on the 
stripling David, scholarship is a hinderance to an 
Evangelist ; but that it needs never be ; and in any 
case it was not so in this instance ; for, as we have 
seen, Dickson was accounted qualified to fill the 
chair of a Theological Professor both in Glasgow 
and Edinburgh, and besides he was devoted to sa- 
cred studies, for he devised and partly carried out an 
exposition of the Scriptures, after the fashion of the 
Speaker's Commentary in our own times. A writer 
competent to express an opinion has said, regarding 
him, " His plan was to assign particular books to 
men competent for the work, and to him we owe 
it that we have Ferguson, on the Epistles ; Hutchi- 
son, on the minor Prophets, Job, and the Gospel of 
John ; and Durham, on the Song and the Book of 
Revelation. Dickson himself put his hand to the 

* Quoted in Hetherington's " History of the Church of Scot- 
land," vol. i., pp. 260, 261. 



DICKSOK 103 

work. We have his English notes on Matthew and 
the Epistle to the Hebrews. His exposition of the 
Psalms is not unknown to Christian readers still, and 
besides we have from him annotations in Latin on 
the whole of the Epistles." * In his earlier years 
Rutherf urd and he were bosom friends, but after 
1650 they took different sides in ecclesiastical poli- 
tics, Dickson being a Royalist, or, as the name of the 
time was, a Resolutioner,f and Rutherfurd a rigid 
Protester against placing any reliance whatever on 
either Charles; and so he came in for some of his 
old friend's invective. But his refusal to take the 
oath of supremacy at the Restoration may be re- 
garded as a proof that he had come to see that, with 
whatever narrowness and intolerance, the Protesters 
had been the more far-seeing of the two ; and in 
any case he had little in him of that overbearing 
spirit which is so great a puzzle to us in the char- 
acter of the author of the famous Letters. He 
preached frequentty after he had become a profess- 
or, but not with the same power as before, so that 
Sir Hugh Campbell, of Cesnock, gave the following 
quaint account of the several stages of his pulpit 

* Walker's " Scottish Theology and Theologians," pp. 14, 15. 
t See Note II. at the end of this lecture. 



104 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

eloquence. I tell the story for the sake of its warn- 
ing to all Professors of Theology : " The Professor 
of Divinity at Edinburgh is truly a great man ; the 
Professor of Divinity at Glasgow was a still greater 
man ; but the minister of Irvine was the greatest 
man of all ;" his greatness thus diminishing just as 
his distance from the pastorate increased. 

But I must hasten on to the other of the two 
names to which I alluded. In the history of the 
British House of Commons we come upon a man 
who was nicknamed " Single-speech Hamilton," be- 
cause he had made only one address in Parliament, 
but that one had made him famous. So we might 
almost call John Livingstone " Single -sermon" 
Livingstone ; not, indeed, because he had preached 
only one sermon, or because he was eminent for 
nothing else, for he had, even for those eventful 
times, a stirring history, and was "the most popular 
preacher of his time," but because his name now 
is virtually preserved from oblivion by the effects 
that followed a sermon of his at the kirk of Shotts, 
near Glasgow, on the Monday after a Communion 
Sunday in 1630. Born at Kilsyth in 1603, and ed- 
ucated at the University of Glasgow, he was li- 



LIVINGSTONE. 105 

censed to preach in 1625; but owing to the restric- 
tions then existing, he did not obtain a parish, and 
in consequence went to Ireland, where he labored 
for a year in Killinchy, but was then suspended for 
nonconformity by the Bishop of Down. A year af- 
ter his sentence was reversed he entered anew upon 
his labors, but in 1635 he was again suspended, 
and no prospect of restoration appearing, he deter- 
mined to go to New England ; but he was driven 
back by storms to Ireland, and finding no opening 
there, he returned to Scotland. For ten years sub- 
sequent to 1638 he was minister of Stranraer, and 
thence, in 1648, he was transferred to Ancrum ; but 
though he was one of those who were sent to treat 
with Charles the Second at the Hague, he fell un- 
der the displeasure of the government after the 
Restoration, and was banished from the country. 
He found an asylum at Rotterdam, where he spent 
the remainder of his days in preparing a Hebrew- 
Latin Bible, which, however, was never published, 
and where he died in 1672. He was for these 
times a great Oriental scholar,* knowing Hebrew 
and Chaldee, and something of Syriac and Arabic, 



* See Note III. at the end of this lecture. 

5* 



106 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

so that, as one says, "he was such a scholar as we 
shall not readily fall in with in these days in the 
Church,"* 

The history of his famous sermon is worth giv- 
ing, if for nothing else, at least for the illustration 
which it furnishes of that Providence of the Holy 
Spirit by which little things are made to lead up to 
great results. 

A carriage occupied by some ladies of rank broke 
down near the parsonage of Shotts, and the minis- 
ter, having had some slight previous acquaintance 
with them, invited the travellers to alight and re- 
main under his roof until the damage was repaired. 
As they sat they observed that the house was in a 
very dilapidated state, and in return for his atten- 
tions they exerted themselves to secure the erection 
of a new parsonage in a better situation. After he 
had received this great kindness at their hands, the 
minister asked them how he could testify his grati- 
tude to them, and they, being earnest evangelical 
Christians, requested that he would invite to assist 
him at his next sacramental season certain preach- 
ers whose names they furnished, and among these 

* Walker's " Scottish Theology and Theologians/' p. 21. 



LIVINGSTONE. 107 

was Livingstone, who was then chaplain to the 
Countess of Wigton, and only twenty-seven years 
old. The pastor was only too glad to give his con- 
sent, and the news spreading abroad, an immense 
concourse of people assembled for the occasion. 
The services on the Saturday and Sunday* had been 
so unusually delightful that the people were un- 
willing to depart without holding a special thanks- 
giving on the Monday, and Livingstone was pressed 
to preach. Here is his own account of the matter: 
" The night before I had been with some Christians, 
who spent the night in prayer and conference. 
When I was alone in the fields, about eight or nine 
of the clock in the morning, before w T e were to go 
to sermon, there came such a misgiving of spirit 
upon me, considering my unworthiness and weak- 
ness, and the multitude and expectation of the 
people, that I was consulting with myself to have 
stolen away somewhere and declined that day's 
preaching, but that I thought I durst not so far dis- 

* For an accurate description of the service of a Scottish 
communion occasion of the olden time, see "Peter's Letters to 
his Kinsfolk," by J. G. Lockhart, vol. iii., pp. 301-334. The 
abuses connected with it were satirized by Burns in the "Holy 
Fair," but the other side of the picture has been exquisitely de- 
lineated by Principal Shairp in ' ' Kilmahoe, and Other Poems. " 



108 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

trust God, and so went to sermon and got good as- 
sistance about an hour and a half upon the points 
I had meditated on: 'Then will I sprinkle clean 
water upon you, and ye shall be clean : from all 
your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse 
you. A new heart also will I give you, and a new 
spirit will I put within you : and I will take away 
the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you 
a heart of flesh.' (Ezek., xxxvi. 25, 26.) And in 
the end, offering to close with some words of exhor- 
tation, I was led on about an hour's time, in a strain 
of exhortation and warning, with such liberty and 
melting of heart as I never had the like in public 
in all my life." It was almost like another day of 
Pentecost. Some five hundred persons were con- 
verted through that one discourse ; and as one says, 
" it was the sowing of a seed through Clydesdale, so 
that many of the most eminent Christians of that 
country could date either their conversion or some 
remarkable conformation of their case from that 
day." * God takes long views, and by these two 
revivals — one in Ayrshire and the other in Lanark- 
shire—he prepared a people for the terrible struggle 

* Fleming, on the Fulfilment of Prophecy, quoted by Hether- 
ington in " Church History of Scotland," vol. i., p. 262. 



NOTES. 109 

that was to come in Scotland ; for it is a remarkable 
fact that from these two counties, within the next 
thirty years, came a large part of the strength of 
that covenanting party, the echoes of whose wor- 
ship are lingering yet in the glens and among the 
hills of Scotland. The Gospel, dear young brethren, 
is not yet effete. What it did in the seventeenth 
century it can do again in the nineteenth. Be it 
yours, therefore, to prepare yourselves, by scholar- 
ship, by study, by prayer, by deep, humble, fervent 
trust in the help of the Holy Spirit, to preach it in 
utter forgetf ulness of self, and you, too, will have 
reason to say with Paul, "I am not ashamed of the 
Gospel of Christ : for it is the power of God unto 
salvation to every one that believeth." 

Note I. See page 92. 

Rutherfurd and Usher. 

The best version which I have seen of this traditional story, 
differing in one or two details from that given by Dean Stan- 
ley, but agreeing in every particular with that which I heard 
often from my father's lips in the home of my boyhood, is that 
given by Andrew Thomson, D.D., in his delightful little volume 
on Rutherfurd, which is one of the series "Men Worth Re- 
membering." It is to the following effect: "The devout and 
learned Archbishop Usher was on his way from England to his 
, diocese of Armagh, and passing near Anwoth on a Saturday 
afternoon, anxious to listen to the preaching of one of whose 
piety and eloquence he had heard much, he assumed the dis- 



110 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

guise of a wayfaring man, or mendicant, and turning aside to 
Anwoth Manse, asked lodging for the night. According to the 
custom and law of the good pastor's house, not to be ' forget- 
ful to entertain strangers/ he was readily received. It was the 
practice of Mrs. Rutherfurd, while her husband was engaged 
in finishing his preparations for the coining Lord's Day, to 
gather together her servants and the * strangers within her 
gate,' for the purpose of catechizing them on some religious 
subject; and on this occasion the stranger in lowly garb readily 
joined the little circle of catechumens. Probably for the pur- 
pose of testing the knowledge of the wayfarer, Mrs. Rutherf urd 
asked him how many commandments there were? To which 
he answered, ' Eleven.' Regarding this as evidence of unusual 
ignorance, she expressed to her husband, at a later period in 
the evening, her fears that the stranger was very ill-instructed 
in religion, and mentioned as evidence of the fact that he did 
not even know the number of the commandments. Rising 
early on the Sabbath morning, and retiring for prolonged devo- 
tion to his sanctuary not far oil among the trees, Rutherfurd 
was astonished to find that there was one there already engaged 
in solitary worship. It was the stranger w T ho had been wel- 
comed the night before to his hospitality. Listening, he was 
struck with the evidence which his words afforded of the re- 
ligious knowledge and the depth of devotion of the suppliant; 
and as soon as the prayer was ended he accosted him, and told 
him that he was certain that he was not the mendicant that he 
appeared to be. Disguise was no longer necessary or possible, 
and Usher, not unwillingly, revealed himself. The scene ended 
in Rutherfurd's urging him to preach for him, to which Usher 
assented, not averse to conform for the day to the simpler 
forms of Presbyterian worship. He read out as his text those 
words of the Master: 'A new commandment I give unto you, 
that ye love one another.' This explained all. ' There,' whis- 
pered Rutherfurd to his wife, ' is the eleventh command- 
ment.'" 



NOTES. Ill 

Note II. See page 103. 
Resolutioners and Protesters. 

" The Resolutioners and Protesters were two parties formed 
in the Church of Scotland in consequence of certain resolu- 
tions agreed upon by the Commission of the General Assembly, 
and afterwards approved of by the Assembly itself, with respect 
to the admission into places of power and trust in the Army 
and State of such as had by various Acts of Parliament been 
excluded on account of their malignancy or opposition to the 
covenant and liberties of the nation, provided they gave satis- 
faction to the Church. Those who approved of these resolu- 
tions were called ' Resolutioners ;' those who were opposed to 
them were called 'Anti -Resolutioners/ or 'Protesters/ from 
their having given in or adhered to a protestation against the 
lawfulness of the Assembly held Juty, 1651, at St. Andrews, 
and adjourned to Dundee, by which these resolutions were rati- 
fied. The protestation was given in by the famous Samuel 
Rutherfurd, and signed by twenty - two members. Future 
events showed the impolicy of these resolutions. The men 
who were admitted by them into places of power and trust in 
the Army and State became, as the Protesters always predicted, 
the persecutors of the Church. Had the counsels of the Pro- 
testers prevailed, the twenty-eight years' persecution might not 
have existed." — Note by Rev. James Anderson in the Martyrs of 
the Bass, in "The Bass Bock," p. 181. 

Note III. See page 105. 
- Education of Dickson, Livingstone, and Others. 
" To explain the high attainments in learning which Dickson 
and his illustrious contemporaries possessed, it may be neces- 
sary to advert to the Scottish education of this period, more 
especialty as it is frequently misunderstood and grossly misrep- 
resented. Andrew Melville had returned from the Continent, 
not only richly furnished with all the learning of the age, but 
with a complete acquaintance with the most effectual methods 



112 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

of imparting it; and such was the admirable system which he 
had organized for the universities of Glasgow and St. Andrews 
that in literary reputation they were inferior to no colleges in 
Europe. The curriculum of education for the ministry espe- 
cially was such as might justly put to the blush the superficial 
acquirements of their modern representatives. The young 
pupil at his admission was expected to be a thorough proficient 
in Latin, otherwise he could not understand the prelections, 
which were generally delivered in that tongue. In addition to 
the higher Latin classics with which the course commenced, 
the students were initiated into the Greek Grammar, and car- 
ried through the ample routine of the Greek poets and histo- 
rians. To these literary acquirements succeeded the study of 
rhetoric, ethics, physics, geometry, and history; after which the 
alumni were introduced to their more important work of study- 
ing theology as a science, in all its departments, and the East- 
ern languages with which it is connected. This course con- 
tinued for six years, and without those long vacations which 
have crept into modern education. This rigid training was 
by no means terminated with a six years' course in the case of 
the most eminent of our Scottish divines. Such as had most 
highly distinguished themselves by talents and acquirements 
during that period were appointed professors, or regents, as 
they were then called, and in this capacity they had ample 
opportunities of maturing what they had already learned, as 
well as of enlarging the bounds of their knowledge, and after 
regenting for eight years they were then admitted into the min- 
istry." — Life of David Dickson, prefixed to "Select Writings of 
Dickson, pp. vi., vii." Published 1845 by the Committee of the 
Free Church Assembly. 



IV. 

ARCHBISHOP LEIGHTON.— THE FIELD -PREACHERS. 

Before entering upon the special period to be 
covered by the present lecture, we must pause a 
moment or two for the purpose of taking in the 
historical situation. After the union of the crowns 
of England and Scotland it seems to have been one 
great object of the ambition of the Stuarts to assim- 
ilate or unite the churches of the two kingdoms by 
fastening Episcopacy upon Scotland. This they all 
sought to accomplish by the mere force of civil au- 
thority, irrespective altogether of the preferences 
of the people. Thus resistance to their dictation 
became a struggle for civil freedom as well as, and 
indeed ultimately perhaps fully more than, a dis- 
pute about ecclesiastical government; and although 
the Covenanters themselves would have been glad 
enough to have effected a union of the churches by 
making England Presbyterian, and even sought to 
accomplish that end by force of law through the 
Solemn League and Covenant, yet their efforts and 



114 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

sufferings in opposition to their oppressors contrib- 
uted to the securing of a larger liberty than they 
themselves would have approved. " They builded 
wiser than they knew," and in the evolution of 
God's providence they are seen to be among the 
pioneers of civil and religious freedom. The de- 
sign of the Stuarts was largely checkmated in the 
case of James the Sixth of Scotland and First of 
England by the Scottish Parliament of 1792; and 
in that of Charles the First by the Edinburgh riot 
in 1637; the signing of the National Covenant in 
1638; the famous General Assembly which met in 
Glasgow in the same year ; the signing of the Sol- 
emn League and Covenant in London in 1643 ; the 
execution of Charles himself in 1649; and the be- 
nevolent despotism of Cromwell during the Pro- 
tectorate. But with the restoration of Charles the 
Second to the throne of his ancestors a reign of ter- 
ror was inaugurated which has its parallel only in 
the cruelties of Alva in the Low Countries and the 
deeds of the Dragonades in France. 

In December, 1661, four Scottish ministers — 
James Sharpe, afterwards so foully murdered on 
Magus Moor, James Hamilton, Andrew Fairfowl, 
and Robert Leighton — were ordained in London as 



ARCHBISHOP LEIGHTOK— FIELD-PREACHERS. 115 

priests, and consecrated as bishops to the dioceses of 
St. Andrews, Galloway, Glasgow, and Dunblane re- 
spectively, in order, if possible, to carry out the 
royal programme. They started to go down w r ith 
great state in a new carriage to Edinburgh, intend- 
ing to make a formal entry into the northern capi- 
tal ; but Leighton, already disgusted with his com- 
panions, left them at Morpeth to carry out their 
intention by themselves, and made his way quietly 
to the house of a friend, near his former parsonage 
of JSTewbattle. 

Shortly after this, when the Earl of Middleton 
came down to Scotland as the king's commissioner, 
Fairfowl, the archbishop of Glasgow, complained to 
him that none of the younger ministers of his dio- 
cese who had entered office since 1649 had attended 
his ecclesiastical courts or would recognize his epis- 
copal authority, and suggested that an ordinance 
should be made to the effect that unless within a 
given date all who had begun their ministry subse- 
quent to 1649 should obtain presentations to their 
parishes, and should apply to the bishops for colla- 
tion and admission, they should be ejected from 
their homes, their pulpits, and their livings. Judg- 
ing others probably from himself, lie supposed that 



116 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

in the face of such a penalty all but a very few 
would conform ; and in an evil hour the Council, 
most of whose members were said to have been at 
the time intoxicated, passed that drastic measure 
which afterwards became infamous as the Glasgow 
Act. Only one month's warning w T as given, and 
soldiers were commanded to pull the preachers from 
their pulpits if they should venture to disobey. 
The result was that on the last Sabbath of October 
in that year (1.662) two hundred pastors took fare- 
well of their flocks, and soon after nearly two hun- 
dred more followed their example, thus anticipating 
by almost two hundred years the memorable disrup- 
tion of 1843, but with this difference, that the Cov- 
enanters acted singly, each one for himself, while 
the Free -Church men were sustained by mutual 
counsel, and had taken measures for their future 
organization. These four hundred were the " outed 
ministers " of whom we read so much in the histo- 
ries of the period ; and their noble self-sacrifice as 
they went forth from their manses, not knowing 
whither they went, but casting themselves upon 
Him whom they were seeking to serve, was one of 
the sublimest offerings ever laid upon the altar of 
conscience. Not quite two months before, on St. 



ARCHBISHOP LEIGHTON.— FIELD-PREACHERS. 117 

Bartholomew's Day, their act had been paralleled 
in England, when two thousand clergymen had left 
their parsonages and parishes rather than conform 
to the Act of Uniformity which had been enforced 
there ; and so within two years after his restoration 
to the throne this was Charles's commentary on the 
solemn declaration which he had made at Breda to 
the following effect : " We do declare a liberty to 
tender consciences, and that no man shall be dis- 
quieted or called in question for differences of opin- 
ion in matters of religion which do not disturb the 
peace of the kingdom, and that we shall be ready to 
consent to such an Act of Parliament as upon ma- 
ture deliberation shall be offered to us for the grant- 
ing of that indulgence." But then the Stuarts, like 
the Cretians, were "always liars," and these and sim- 
ilar doings of theirs give point to the witty epigram 
written as an epitaph for one of them : . 

"Here lies our sovereign lord the king, whose word no man 
relies on, 
Who never said a foolish thing, and never did a wise one." 

After these four hundred ministers had been thus 
" outed " from their parishes, curates whom even 
Bishop Burnet describes as taken from " the dregs 
and refuse of the northern parts " were put into 



118 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

their places, so that the people did not care to wait 
upon their ministry, and sought the services of their 
old pastors in conventicles which assembled in re- 
tired spots on the moors or among the hills, with no 
roof above them but the sky. More than once, as 
at Bullion Green, Drumclog, and Bothwell Bridge, 
they defended themselves by an appeal to arms, and 
the persecution to which they were subjected, and in 
the course of which eighteen thousand people were in 
one way or other put to death, lasted, with occasion- 
al lulls, more or less brief, throughout the reigns of 
Charles the Second and James the Second, and was 
terminated only by the Kevolution, which placed 
William of Orange on the British throne. 

For the revolting details I must refer you to the 
numerous monographs on the Scottish Covenanters,* 

* The most reliable summaries of the history of the Cove- 
nanters are such works as the following: "The Scots Worthies," 
by John Howie, of Lochgoin— best edition that edited by Rev. 
W. H. Carslaw. Edinburgh: Johnston, Hunter & Co., 1870; 
"The Martyrs and Heroes of the Scottish Covenant," by 
George Gilfillan. Edinburgh: Gall & Inglis ; "Fifty Years' 
Struggle of the Scottish Covenanters," by J. Dodds. Edin- 
burgh : Oliphant & Co.; "The Scottish Covenanters," by 
James Taylor, D.D. London: Cassell; "The Wigtown Mar- 
tyrs," by Kev. Alexander Stewart; the valuable volumes of the 
late Dr. Simpson, of Sanquhar, entitled "Traditions of the Cove- 
nanters ;" and "A Voice from the Desert ; or, The Church in 
the Wilderness." 



ARCHBISHOP LEIGHTON.— FIELD-PREACHERS. 119 

but I have said enough to give you an intelligent 
idea of the situation when Leighton entered upon 
the bishopric of Dunblane. That a man like him 
should be found on the side of those who were driv- 
ing things to such extremities is as remarkable as 
it is that, having taken that position, his memory 
should now be regarded, even by Scotchmen gener- 
ally, with a veneration akin to that which they cher- 
ish for the martyrs to the cause to which he was op- 
posed. One can understand how Charles came to 
press him into such a service, for his character for 
saintliness was even then well known ; and just as 
Jehu sought to give respectability to his unscrupu- 
lous deeds by getting Jehonadab the Rechabite to 
ride with him in his chariot, so we may well believe 
that Charles was glad to get some man of worth 
identified with his enterprise. But it is more diffi- 
cult to account for Leighton's acceptance of such a 
position. One thing, at least, is clear. He had no 
hereditary reasons for being partial to the Prelatic 
party, for his father had his ears cropped and his 
nose slit, and was condemned to stand in the pil- 
lory, and to be put into prison, for having published 
a work entitled " Zion's Plea against the Prelates." 
It was not a very temperate book, for it had in it 



120 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

not a little of the bitterness which was characteris- 
tic of the controversies of the period, and from 
which not ever! Milton can be said to have been 
altogether free ; but it had nothing whatever in 
it that could be a justification of such cruel treat- 
ment. 

Robert was born, probably, in London, in 1611, 
and at the age of sixteen he was sent down to Ed- 
inburgh University for his education, just about the 
time at which his father was subjected to the igno- 
miny of the pillory. After finishing his student 
course he spent ten years on the Continent, where 
he came into close fellowship with some of the Jan- 
senists,from whom it is conjectured that he received 
those leanings in the direction of quietism which 
marked his life. He returned to Scotland in 1641 
— the year of his father's release from prison — and 
after receiving license to preach he was ordained as 
a Presbyterian minister at Newbattle, where he re- 
mained till 1653, when he was appointed Principal 
of the University of Edinburgh. He held that po- 
sition for eight years, and was then consecrated 
Bishop of Dunblane. 

Up till that time he had been a Presbyterian, 
but though he had signed the covenant with his 



ARCHBISHOP LEIGHTOK— FIELD-PREACHERS. 121 

people in 1643, there is evidence that during the 
latter part of his pastorate at Newbattle he was be- 
ginning to find himself out of sympathy with the 
Divine right doctrines of his co-presbyters, and was 
glad to find a retreat in the University. He did 
not believe that any form of Church government 
was laid down in Scripture, and he was indeed 
largely indifferent to the whole matter of ecclesias- 
tical politj', so that he might have said, " that which 
is best administered is best." Therefore he sacri- 
ficed no principle in accepting a bishopric, and yet 
he was never perfectly happy in his position as a 
bishop. He had really nothing in common in the 
highest parts of his nature with the Sharpes and 
the Fairfowls, with whom he was officially associat- 
ed. He hated the intolerance which they mani- 
fested, and was so utterly opposed to the cruelties 
which they practised that he went so far as to com- 
plain of them to the king, and declared that " he 
could not concur in the planting of the Christian 
religion itself in a country in such a violent man- 
ner, much less a form of Church government." * 

* This is the opinion even of Episcopalians now. Lieuten- 
ant-colonel Alexander Ferguson, in his interesting monograph 
on " The Laird of Lag," has said that " no fair-minded and in- 
6 



122 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

Even as early as 1665 lie desired to resign his 
office, but lie allowed himself to be overpersuaded 
again, and after laboring ten years in Dunblane he 
was made Archbishop of Glasgow, but finally, in 
1674, he gave up his charge, and retired to the 
home of his sister in Broadhurst, Sussex, where he 
lived in privacy for ten years more, and died, 
strangely enough, according to a wish of his own, 
in an inn, on the 25th of June, 1684. 

He was apparently a man " born out of due time." 
He had something of the ascetic, and something also 
of the mystic in his nature. He sought to live above 
the " mad whirl " and " dim confusion " of the world, 
and was ever a lover of peace. With very definite 
views of his own both in theology and other matters 
he did not care to fight for their supremacy, and 
was much of the same mind as he who said, "I had 
as lief be a martyr for love's sake as for truth's." 



telligent Episcopalian can read the history of the period of re- 
stored Episcopacy under Charles the Second and James the 
Seventh without a sense of shame and humiliation. ' It isn't 
for men to make channels for God's spirit as they make chan- 
nels for watercourses, and say, " Flow here, but flow not there," ' 
quoth Dinah Morris, and it is true. But at the period in ques- 
tion the current of common justice was held back, civil liberty 
was lost." — ' ' The Laird of Lag : A Life-sketch" p. xv. 



ARCHBISHOP LEIGHTON.— FIELD -PREACHERS. 123 

He had not the qualities needed to fit him to be 
a leader even in the best of times, much less in 
that seething and tempestuous age into the midst 
of which he was sent. The temptation which al- 
lured him to consent to become a bishop was the 
hope that thereby he might act as a mediator be- 
tween the two contending parties, with neither of 
whom, owing perhaps to his long absence from 
Scotland in his early manhood, was he in full sym- 
pathy. He honestly attempted to construct a plat- 
form on which both might stand, and he conducted 
the affairs of his diocese in a way that was studi- 
ously conciliatory, while he held himself aloof from 
all the cruelties which were committed by Sharpe 
and others in the name of loyalty and religion. 
But in all this he pleased neither party. By the 
Presbyterians he w r as regarded as a traitor, and 
by the Episcopalians he was treated as a trimmer. 
But the fineness of his spirit and the thoroughly 
evangelical character of his works have redeemed 
his name from the reproach which contemporary 
combatants had cast upon it ; and now that the 
smoke and din of the battle have passed away, his 
influence as a preacher is felt b}^ ministers of all de- 
nominations more than that of any man of his gen- 



124 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

eration. Indeed his name marks the beginning of 
a new era in the history of the Scottish Pulpit. 
Not that he made anything like a new doctrinal de- 
parture, for he was a sincere Calvinist. Coleridge, 
indeed, tries to make it appear that he was a Cal- 
vinist only in some private sense of his own ; but 
it is impossible to read his Exposition of 1st Pe- 
ter without coming frequently into contact with 
the doctrines that are usually identified with that 
s} T stem. He held, as Blaikie* says, " that the ulti- 
mate authority and supreme judge of truth for man is 
God, speaking to him in the Scriptures, and that the 
simple fact that God has there proclaimed it, ought 
to secure for any doctrine the unqualified accept- 
ance of all men." So far he was like his predeces- 
sors, but he held also " that to secure for truth its 
fitting place and its due influence in the soul, it is 
desirable to remove prejudices, to appeal to what- 
ever in the soul comes nearest to it, to establish for 
it a friendly relation to something which is there 
already, and thus to get it to move sweetly and 
freely among the springs and motives of our be- 
ing "f — and therein he was in advance of all who 

* " The Evangelical Succession/' Second Series, p. 204. 
t Ibid. 



ARCHBISHOP LEIGHTON.— FIELD-PREACHERS. 125 

came before him. He abode by the old truths, 
but he put them in an attractive form, and brought 
all the resources of a great learning, all the treas- 
ures of a fine fancy, all the unction of a devout 
heart, and all the beauty of an occasionally exqui- 
site style, to bear on their illustration and enforce- 
ment. 

He is the one Scottish preacher of that time whose 
discourses can be read not only without difficult}', 
but even with enjoyment by the modern student. 
There is more or less of uncouthness in the lan- 
guage of all with whom, up till this point, we have 
been dealing. Their dialect, if so we may call it, 
w r as a decoction of Latin, which was the language 
of the universities ; English, which was the language 
of the press ; and Scotch, which was the language 
of conversation.* Therefore they cannot now be 
intelligently read by any of you without a glossary. 
But Leighton was so far beyond his own age in 
this respect tliat he is little behind ours. He has, 
indeed, now to us here and there a flavor of the 
antique, but so far from taking away from the in- 
terest with which we read him, that only adds to 

* Blaikie, "The Evangelical Succession," Second Series, 
p. 207. 



126 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

the effect which he produces, just as a slight foreign 
accent frequently gives increased fascination to a 
speaker. But perhaps the most striking feature of 
Leighton's discourses is to be found in the beauty 
and appositeness of his illustrations. In this re- 
spect he is far ahead of the preachers of his own 
times, and not surpassed by many of any time. He 
brought his similes from the wide domain of his 
reading, or from the realm of nature, or from the 
sphere of common life, with a profusion that indi- 
cates the wealth of his resources, and with a point 
that never leaves us in doubt as to that which he 
meant to illustrate by them. He did not go off 
away from his subject altogether like Jeremy Tay- 
lor, with a " So have I seen," and then come back 
after a long digression to the matter which had been 
wellnigh overlaid by his description. But when he 
used a simile, it did its w r ork in a moment, like a 
flash of summer lightning in the stillness of the 
night; and when he employed a prolonged meta- 
phor, he never lost himself or befogged his hearers 
by mixing incongruities. As an example of the 
first, take this clause concerning the necessity of 
composing our minds to due thoughts of God be- 
fore entering on prayer : " This would do much to 



ARCHBISHOP LEIGHTON.— FIELD-PREACHERS. 127 

ballast our minds, that they tumble not to and fro as 
is their custom ;" or this, which has become hack- 
neyed now, but was probably used for the first time 
by Leighton : " These divine truths are like a well- 
drawn picture (portrait) which looks particularly 
upon every one of the great multitude that look 
upon it." As an instance of the second, take this ex- 
quisite passage concerning the Old Testament proph- 
ecies : " This sweet stream of their doctrine did as 
the rivers, make its own banks fertile and pleasant 
as it ran by, and flowed still forward to after-ages, 
and by the confluence of more such prophecies grew 
greater as it went, till it fell in with the main cur- 
rent of the Gospel in the New r Testament, both acted 
and preached by the great Prophet himself, whom 
they foretold to come, and recorded by his apostles 
and evangelists, and thus united into one river clear 
as ciystal this doctrine of salvation in the Script- 
ures hath still refreshed the city of God, his Church 
under the Gospel, and still shall do so, till it empty 
itself into the ocean of eternity." All his w T ritings 
belong, as his latest editor has clearly made out, 
to the Presbyterian portion of his life, and they are 
evidence that he made very careful written prepa- 
ration for his pulpit. Whether he committed to 



128 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

memory what he had written, and so gave it to the 
people, is uncertain. But he did not read from a 
manuscript, for as to that practice he said: "I 
know that weakness of memory is pleaded in ex- 
cuse for the custom, but better minds would make 
better memories. Such an excuse is unworthy of 
a man, and much more of a father, who may want 
vent, indeed, in addressing his children, but ought 
never to want matter. Like Elihu he should be 
refreshed by speaking." As to his manner, Baillie 
speaks of it as "the new guise of preaching which 
Mr. Ilu^h Binning and Mr. Eobert Leighton be- 
gun ;" and Burnet says it was "rather too fine," but 
adds, " there was a majesty and beauty in it that left 
so deep an impression that I cannot yet forget the 
sermons I heard him preach thirty years ago." 
When he left ISTewbattle he gave as a reason for 
desiring to demit the pastorate " the extreme weak- 
ness of his voice;" and there could at no time have 
been in it the " skriech " of Butherfurd ; while his 
style as written seems entirely unsuited to the vehe- 
mence that we have marked in some of his prede- 
cessors. His personal appearance is thus described 
by a poet-preacher who occupies to-day no mean 
place in the Scottish pulpit : 



ARCHBISHOP LEIGHTON.— FIELD-PREACHERS. 129 

"A frail, slight form— no temple he, 
Grand, for abode of Deity ; 
Rather a bush inflamed with grace, 
And trembling in a desert place, 
And unconsumed with fire, 
Though burning high and higher. 

"A frail, slight form, and pale with care, 
And paler from the raven hair 
That, folded from a forehead free, 
Godlike of breadth and majesty — 

A brow of thought supreme, 

And mystic, glorious dream. 

"Beautiful spirit! fallen, alas! 
On times when little beauty was ; 
Still seeking peace amidst the strife, 
Still working, weary of thy life ; 

Toiling in holy love, 

Panting for heaven above. 

"For none so lone on earth as he, 
Whose way of thought is high and free, 
Beyond the mist, beyond the cloud, 
Beyond the clamor of the crowd ; 

Moving where Jesus trod, 

In the lone walk with God." * 

Somewhat of his own "higher life" there is in 
these last lines, and an undue glorification of the 
contemplative above the active, the devotional above 
the militant, in the Christian character ; for if God 



* " The Bishop's Walk." Walter C. Smith, D.D. 
6* 



130 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

puts a man into a crowd, he does not ask him to 
move above it, but to go through it. Still, the 
whole description puts Leighton graphically before 
us as he was, and with this knowledge of his envi- 
ronment I ask you, my young brethren, to give dil- 
igent study to his works. They will feed your 
piety even while they quicken all your homiletic 
powers. Put them in a prominent place upon 
your devotional shelf, and take them often down 
to fill in for you those fragmentary minutes which 
otherwise would be lost. Ever and anon you will 
come upon such nuggets as these : " The Sunday's 
sermon lasts but an hour or two, but holiness of 
life is a continued sermon all the week long ;" " The 
master's mind is often more toiled than the serv- 
ant's body ;" " Where there is no feeling at all there 
can be no patience ;" " The Church is the jewel in 
the ring of the world." Frequently, also, as in his 
treatment of the doctrine of election, or his com- 
ment on Christ's bearing our sins, you will find 
the truth stated in a most striking and attractive 
manner, and with such an appreciation of the very 
point where the difficulty lies as enables him to do 
much in the way of removing it altogether. He 
has been for long to me one of the richest of my 



ARCHBISHOP LEIGHTOK— FIELD-PREACHERS. 131 

classics for the closet; and if you think that I have 
"exceeded" in my eulogy, I can only say that I 
have come honestly by my admiration of the good 
archbishop ; for Dr. John Brown, of Edinburgh, at 
whose feet I sat when, like you, I was preparing for 
the ministry, was most hearty and emphatic in his 
praise, and has left on record the following testi- 
mony to his worth, behind which I am quite will- 
ing to shelter myself even when I adopt it as my 
own. Speaking of the Exposition of 1st Peter, he 
says : " That very remarkable work teaches a sin- 
gularly pure and complete theology — a theology 
thoroughly evangelical, in the true sense of that 
often abused epithet, being equally free from Legal- 
ism on the one hand and Antinomianism on the 
other; in a spirit of enlightened and affectionate 
devotion, love to the brotherhood, and charity to 
all men, and in a style which, though very un- 
equal, indicates in its general structure a familiarity 
with the classic models of antiquity ; and in occa- 
sional expressions is in the highest degree felicitous 
and beautiful. As a Biblical expositor, Leighton 
was above his own age, and as a theologian and 
practical writer few have equalled, still fewer sur- 
passed him, either before or since his time. . . . 



132 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

Laboring under more than the ordinary disadvan- 
tages of posthumous publications, through the ex- 
treme slovenliness with which they, with but few 
exceptions, were in the first instance edited, his 
works are eminently fitted to form the student of 
theology to sound views and a right spirit, and to 
minister to the instruction and delight of the pri- 
vate Christian — possessing in large measure and 
rare union those qualities which must endear them 
to every Christian mind, however uncultured, and 
those which are fitted to afford high gratification to 
them in whom the knowledge and love of evangel- 
ical truth are connected with literary attainment 
and polished taste." * When I first heard these 
words from the lips of my revered instructor, I be- 
lieved them on his testimony, but I know their 
truth now from my own experience, and I pass 
them on to you that you may profit from them as 
I did. It would not be good, perhaps, to read noth- 
ing but Leighton, for he lacks manliness, and would 
not fit us for the sterner side of Christian duty ; but 
in an age like ours, when all is stir and bustle and 
push, his books furnish a first-rate alterative, and 

* Preface to "Expository Discourses on 1st Peter." John 
Brown, D.D. 



ARCHBISHOP LEIGHTON.—FIELD-PREACHERS. 133 

help to restore the devotional to its true place in 
the life of the soul. 

But good as Leighton was, he did little or nothing 
to bring the blessing of peace to his distracted coun- 
try. His plan of amalgamating Episcopacy with 
Presbytery proved to be nothing better than " a 
devout imagination ;" for during most of the years 
of his bishopric and archbishopric, and indeed for 
some considerable time after his death, the adhe- 
rents of the covenant were subjected to bitter per- 
secutions. Fines for non-attendance at the parish 
churches were exacted until the victims were utterly 
ruined. Soldiers were quartered upon the people 
in such numbers that they absolutely devoured their 
substance. The presence of any one at a conventi- 
cle, especially if he was a minister and had preached, 
was held to be enough to warrant his apprehension, 
and that usually issued in his imprisonment on the 
Bass Bock, or in Dunnottar Castle, or elsewhere, or 
in his banishment from the country, or in his exe- 
cution on the scaffold. It is not wonderful, there- 
fore, that those who were thus oppressed lifted the 
J sword in their defence ; but that, after the failure of 
the Pentland rising, only made matters worse for 



134 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

the time, and heated the fire more fiercely than 
ever. 

In 1669 the king, who did everything apparently 
by his own will, and without troubling himself with 
any Parliament, gave liberty to the Scottish Council 
at its discretion to appoint the outed ministers to 
vacant parishes under certain limitations. Many 
among them, with whatever reluctance, submitted 
to the terms imposed, and returned to the labor 
which they loved ; others, however, sturdily refused 
to go back to their parishes on the conditions pre- 
scribed, and so the Covenanters were again divided, 
this time into those who approved and those who 
disapproved of the "Indulgence," as it was called. 
Judged by the event, the more rigid and unbend- 
ing were fully justified in the course they took, 
although it drew upon them a fiercer persecution 
than ever; but it is hard to blame with any severity 
the men who, weary of what seemed to be a vain 
resistance, allowed themselves to be allured back 
to their pulpits and their people, even though the 
terms on which they returned amounted almost to 
the stultification of their former heroism. Indeed, 
as to this whole struggle it is exceedingly difficult 
to get at a perfectly unbiassed estimate of the men 



ARCHBISHOP LEIGHTON.— FIELD-PREACHERS. 135 

who took part in it, and certainly I cannot pretend 
to rigid impartiality in the case, for one of my own 
direct ancestors, Captain John Paton, of Meadow- 
head, was a prominent leader among the laymen, 
and fought valiantly at Pentland and Bothwell 
Bridge, ultimately laying down his life on the scaf- 
fold in the Grassmarket of Edinburgh for the cause 
with which he was identified. But I am persuaded 
that the "Poundtext" of "Old Mortality" is no 
better a representative of the Indulged clergyman 
of the period than the " Kettledrummle " is of the 
field-preachers of these times. 

In the "History of Kilmarnock" there is men- 
tion made of a Mr. Wedderburn, one of the In- 
dulged, who is said to have been much esteemed for 
his worth, piety, and learning, and who drew upon 
himself a blow from the musket of a soldier for at- 
tempting to remonstrate with the military on their 
discreditable conduct in the pillaging of the people.* 
On the other hand, the traditional descriptions of 
those whose voices were so often heard on the open 
moorland forbid us to regard them as unlearned and 
ignorant mountebanks, after the type of "Muckle- 

* "History of Kilmarnock," p. 49. Archibald McKay. 



136 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

wrath," or half-insane fanatics, like "Ephraim Mac- 
briar." They had all received a liberal education. 
Some of them belonged to the best families of the 
land, and the uncouthness of their speech and man- 
ners was that of their times, for which they are not 
now more ridiculous than their contemporaries. 
They had their faults, and it is not to be denied 
that they had not attained to such views regarding 
civil and religious liberty as those which are now 
generally accepted among ourselves; while there 
were, perhaps, some things about them that might 
by modern excpisites be made ludicrous; but there 
was no comedy, nor anything that can by all the 
efforts of genius be made to appear farcical, in their 
sufferings. These were all tragic — nay, because they 
were endured for conscience' sake they were sub- 
lime; and even those who have no sympathy with 
their opinions have been compelled to do homage 
to the purity of their motives and the calmness of 
their courage. 

When, however, we go in search of the eloquence 
which is ascribed to them as preachers, we must re- 
member that their discourses have come down to 
us for the most part in fragments taken as notes by 
their hearers amid many difficulties, and without 



ARCHBISHOP LEIGHTON.— FIELD-PREACHERS. 137 

the aid of stenography, so that they give us but lit- 
tle idea of the sermons as a whole. Moreover, it 
is not to be forgotten that much of the eloquence 
that was ascribed to the preachers was really in the 
very remarkable circumstances under which they 
spoke. Their conventicles were held in places far 
up amid the silence of the mountains, near the 
sources of the Nith and the Clyde, in the uplands 
of Ayrshire, Dumfriesshire, and Lanarkshire, or in 
bleak morasses like " the wild and lone Airdsmoss." 
The people came together sometimes in the early 
morning, and sometimes amid the stillness of the 
night, and many of the men were armed with mus- 
kets and short swords. Sentinels were posted at 
points of vantage to give timely warning of the 
coming of the enemy, and no one of them knew 
but that he might be called within a few hours to 
seal his testimony with his blood. Occasionally the 
sacraments were administered. Little children were 
in a very true sense "baptized for the dead" with 
water taken from the purling brook, and the table 
of the Lord was literally spread full often " in the 
wilderness." The sound of praise at such times was 
borne aloft and afar upon the breeze, and it was 
from scenes like these that the old version of the 



138 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

Psalms of David in metre acquired that peculiar 
charm which they still have for every Scotchman, 
indissolubly associated as they are with the patriot- 
ism of his fathers as well as with the worship of his 
God. They are thus to the pious peasantry of that 
land very much what the " Battle Hymn of the Re- 
public" and other stirring songs are to the people 
of these Northern States. Nay, they are more ; for 
because he knows that his fathers marched to vic- 
tory at Drumclog to the music of its words, the 
psalm which thus begins, 

"In Judali's land God is well known: 

His name's in Israel great. 
In Salem is His tabernacle, 

In Zion is His seat. 
There arrows of the bow he brake, 

The shield, the sword, the war; 
More glorious thou than hills of pre}', 

More excellent art far," 

thrills his heart with an emotion that is all the 
deeper because the love of country combines with 
the love of God to give it power. 

At such gatherings, therefore, there was eloquence, 
and that, too, of a high order, in the mere occasion ; 
and if to-day, in reading the reports of the sermons 
of the field-preachers, we fail to find a full justifi- 



ARCHBISHOP LEIGHTOK— FIELD-PREACHERS. 139 

cation of the terms in which they were described by 
those who listened to them, we must remember that 
not even the ablest stenographer could reproduce 
the environment out of which the discourses grew, 
and in which they were delivered. But as I have 
looked carefully over, them, I have been struck 
with the fulness of their presentation of the Gos- 
pel, and the fervor of their appeals to sinners 
to accept Christ and His salvation. The impres- 
sion among many still is the same as that which a 
writer of the period has exposed regarding Came- 
ron, when he says, "I crave leave to tell you that 
the common report of poor Mr. Cameron was that 
not only did he preach nothing but babble against 
Indulgence, but that he could do no other thing." 
But the perusal of a work like Simpson's "Voice 
from the Desert ; or, The Church in the Wilderness," 
will be enough to substantiate the assertion in re- 
gard to all the preachers which the writer already 
quoted makes concerning Cameron, when he adds, 
"But by his coming hither, the reporters have lost 
their credit of being easily believed in the future . . . 
for here he was found a man of savory gospel spirit, 
the bias of his heart lying towards the proposing 
of Christ, and persuading to a closing with Him." 



140 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

They are quaint words, but they give a true descrip- 
tion — for the climax to which all the discourses lead 
is "the closing" of the individual soul "with Christ." 
And you can see how naturally that came about. 
For the ministers were preaching, as it were, with 
halters round their necks, and each of their hearers 
might have said with David, " There is but a step 
betwixt me and death." It was no time, therefore, 
for playing with Rhetoric, or for cultivating the 
graces of style, or for dealing in matters of mere 
speculation. They came to the point at once; and 
while, as was to be expected, there were many ref- 
erences to the trials of their times and the tyranny 
of their oppressors, the great object of all their ser- 
mons was the presentation of Jesus Christ and Him 
crucified. Nothing can exceed the pathos with 
which the} 7 besought their hearers to be reconciled 
to God and to endure patiently in His cause. It is 
not surprising, therefore, to learn that the ten years 
during which a large portion of the Scottish nation 
met thus from Sabbath to Sabbath in the hidden re- 
cesses of the country, and in defiance of the law, 
were ever afterwards referred to as times of special 
revival. I take two specimens belonging to the lat- 
ter portion of the persecuting era, but yet fairly 



ARCHBISHOP LEIGHTON.— FIELD-PREACHERS. 141 

representative of the whole. What could be more 
effective than such an appeal as this of Cameron, 
addressed to thousands on the mountain-side, from 
the words, " Ye will not come unto me, that ye may 
have life?" 

" Ye that have been plagued with deadness, hard- 
ness of heart, and unbelief, He now requires you to 
give in your answer — yes or no. I take instruments 
before these hills and mountains around us that I 
have offered Him unto you this day. Angels are 
wondering at the offer. They stand beholding with 
admiration that our Lord is giving you such an offer 
this day. What shall I say to Him that sent me? 
Shall I say, 'Lord, there are some yonder saying, 
"I am content to give Christ my heart and hand, 
house, land, and all I have, for His cause?" ' Look 
over to the Shawhead and all those hills — look at 
them. They are all witnesses now, and when you are 
dying they shall come before your face." " Here," 
says the reporter, "both minister and people fell 
into a state of calm weeping ;" and after a long 
pause Cameron, before again proceeding, offered up 
a prayer for the tranquillizing influences of the 
Holy Spirit. Truly such scenes as these are the 
best attestation of eloquence, whether or not we 



142 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

can explain or analyze the secret of its produc- 
tion. 

Take, again, these sentences from Alexander 
Peden, which rise and fall with a plaintive chant, 
followed ever and anon with a recurring refrain al- 
most as of a chorus : " Now, sirs, what is it that has 
carried through the sufferers for Christ these twenty 
years in Scotland ? It is i the fellowship of His suf- 
ferings.' It is the filling up of His sufferings accord- 
ing to the ancient decree of Heaven. For my part, 
I seek no more if he bids me go. He bade many, 
from 1660 to the year of Pentland, go forth to scaf- 
folds and gibbets for Him, and they sought no 
more but His commission; they went, and He car- 
ried them well through. Then, in 1666, at Pent- 
land, He bade so many go to the fields and die for 
Him, and so many to scaffolds and lay down their 
lives for Him ; they sought no more but His com- 
mission ; they went, and He carried them well 
through. Again, in 1679, at Both well, He bade so 
many go to the fields and scaffolds and die for 
Him ; they sought no more but His commission ; 
they went, and He carried them well through. He 
bade so many go to the seas, and be meat for the 
fishes for Him; they sought no more but His 



ARCHBISHOP LEIGHTON.— FIELD-PREACHERS. 143 

commission ; they went, and he carried them well 
through. And afterwards, in 1680, at Airdsmoss, 
He bade so many go to the fields and scaffolds 
for Him; they sought no more but His commis- 
sion and went, and He carried them well through. 
This cup of suffering hath come all the way 
down from Abel to this year 1682 in Scotland. 
Our Lord hath held this cup to all the martyrs' 
heads wherever He had a Church in the world, 
and it will go to all the lips of all the martyrs that 
are to suffer for Christ, even to the sounding of the 
last trumpet. But yet, people of God, it is only the 
brim that the saints taste of. Be ye patient in be- 
lieving. . . . Our noble Captain of salvation hath 
vanquished these bloody persecutors in Scotland 
these twenty-two years, more by the patient suffer- 
ings of the saints than if He had threshed down 
all in a moment. The patient suffering of the 
saints, with their blood running, declares His glory 
much abroad in the world, and especially in these 
lands. As I came through the country there 
was a poor widow whose husband fell at Both- 
well. The bloody soldiers came to plunder her 
house, telling her ' they would take all she had ; we 
will leave thee nothing, either to put in thee or on 



144 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

thee.' 'I care not,' said she; 4 I shall not want so 
long as God is in the heavens.' That was a believ- 
er, indeed." 

" They went, and he carried them well through." 
What a sweet refrain that is ! and can it be possi- 
ble that we have a faint echo of this old sermon in 
the words put by Mrs. Cross into the mouth of Adam 
Bede regarding Moses, "He carried a hard business 
well through ?" I cannot tell ; but this I know, that 
no one who heard these oft-repeated words that day 
would ever be able to forget them, especially when 
we think of them as uttered by a man whose manner 
is thus described by one who was often in his congre- 
gation : "Although every act of worship that Peden 
was engaged in was full of divine flights and useful 
digressions, yet he carried along with them a divine 
stamp; and such was the weighty and convincing 
majesty that accompanied what he spoke, that it 
obliged the hearers both to love and fear him. I 
observed that every time he spoke, whether con- 
versing, reading, praying, or preaching, between ev- 
ery sentence he paused a little, as if he had been 
hearkening what the Lord would say unto him, or 
listening to some secret whisper ; and sometimes 
he would start as if he had seen some surprising 



ARCHBISHOP LEIGHTON.— FIELD-PREACHERS. 145 

sight." * There was that about him, therefore, that 
irresistibly suggested to men Ills communion with 
the unseen. Pie spoke "as seeing Him who is in- 
visible/' and there was the hiding of his power while 
pleading with his fellow-men. 

Then, in the midst of all, was evermore Jesus on 
the cross. To Him these preachers pointed their 
hearers ; from Him they drew their inspiration; and 
out of love to Him they carried on the struggle in 
which they were engaged. "Ye are bought with 
a price, be not ye therefore the bond -servants of 
' men;" that was the principle by which they were 
actuated. They sought independence from men, 
that they might keep themselves entirely for Christ. 
This was what they meant by their enforcement 
of " the headship of Christ ;" and they contended 
for Christ's crown because they felt that they had 
been purchased on Christ's cross. We do not claim 
for them the highest scholarship, the profoundest 
thought, the most polished style, or the finest elo- 
quence, but we do claim for them that they preach- 
ed Christ most effectively, and that they drew for 
themselves, and exhorted all their hearers to draw, 

* Sergeant James Nisbet, quoted in "The Bass Kock," pp. 
52,53. 

7 



146 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

their motives for their daily conduct from the cross 

of their Redeemer; and to all their detractors they 

might have said with Paul, " From henceforth let 

no man trouble us, for we bear in our bodies the 

marks of our Lord Jesus." 

I have given you from a living Presbyterian poet 

a portrait of the good Archbishop Leighton; let 

me gratify myself by concluding this lecture with 

the description given by the Episcopalian Grahame 

of the Covenanters' Sabbath gatherings, in his poem 

on " The Sabbath :" 

"Long ere the dawn, by devious ways, 
O'er hills, through woods, o'er dreary wastes, they sought 
The upland woods, where rivers—there but brooks — 
Dispart to different seas. Fast by such brooks 
A little glen is sometimes scooped, a plat 
With greensward gray, and flowers that strangers seem 
Amid the heathery wild, that all around 
Fatigues the eye. In solitudes like these 
Thy persecuted children, Scotia, foiled 
A tyrant's and a bigot's bloody laws: 
There, leaning on his spear, . . . 
The lyart veteran heard the Word of God 
By Cameron thundered or by Eenwick pour'd 
In gentle stream. Then rose the song, the loud 
Acclaim of praise; the wheeling plover ceased 
Her plaint; the solitary place was glad; 
And on the distant cairn the watcher's ear 
Caught doubtfully at times the breeze-borne note. 
But years more gloomy followed, and no more 
The assembled people dared in face of day 



ARCHBISHOP LEIGHTOK— FIELD-PREACHERS. 147 

To worship God, or even at the dead 

Of night, save when the wintry storm raved fierce, 

And thunder-peals compelled the men of blood 

To crouch within their dens. Then dauntlessly 

The scattered few would meet in some deep dell 

By rock o'er-canopied, to hear the voice — 

Their faithful pastor's voice. He, by the gleam 

Of sheeted lightning, .ope'd the sacred book, 

And words of comfort spake; over their souls m 

His accents soothing came, as to her j r oung 

The heath-fowl's plumes, when at the close of eve 

She gathers in, mournful, her brood dispersed 

By murderous sport, and o'er the remnant spreads 

Fondly her wing. Close nestling 'neath her breast, 

They, cherished, cower amid the purple blooms. " 

The lines have fallen unto us in pleasanter places ; 
but as we sit under the spreading branches of the 
goodly tree of liberty, it becomes us to remember 
that the roots thereof were nourished long ago by 
the blood of these men, and of the brethren and 
companions of these men, of whom we have been 
speaking. "With a great price" they purchased 
this liberty .that we might be "free-born." Let us 
therefore " stand fast in the liberty wherewith," 
through them, " Christ has made us free." 



V. 

THE MODERATES AND EVANGELICALS. 

Duking the eighteenth century a marked change 
came over the Scottish Pulpit. That was the peri- 
od generally described as the Reign of the Moder- 
ates, concerning whom opinions will differ, according 
to the point of view from which they are contem- 
plated. If, for example, with Dean Stanley we 
occupy the position of Broad -Ohurchism, we will 
regard them as the advanced spirits of their age, 
seeking that comprehension of all creeds and classes 
in an Established Church which was the ecclesias- 
tical ideal of that accomplished author. But if we 
have any love for definite theological teaching on 
such subjects as the Fall of Man and the Atonement 
of Christ, or anything like what seem to me to be 
Scriptural views of the importance of Regeneration 
and Conversion, we will look upon the age of their 
ascendancy as one of dark and disastrous eclipse. 

The name by which they are popularly denomi- 
nated was not one of reproach, given to them by 



THE MODERATES AND EVANGELICALS. 149 

their antagonists, but was assumed and gloried in 
by themselves ; so that we are guilty of no mere 
appeal to prejudice against them when we employ 
the term. We have already seen that at and af- 
ter the Revolution-settlement the Church of Scot- 
land, so far as the ministry was concerned, consisted 
of a strange agglomeration of heterogeneous ingre- 
dients. The sixty survivors of those four hun- 
dred ministers who had been"outed" in 1662, 
though they formed the nucleus of the reorganiza- 
tion, were in reality, after a few years, only a small 
minority of the whole. The majority was made 
up of those who, having held cures during the 
years of Episcopacy, retained them through con- 
forming to Presbyterianism, and who were ready 
to submit to patronage enactments, and everything 
else, rather than give up their livings. These last 
were men of no education, little versed in doctri- 
nal matters, and in some instances knowing nothing 
of, and caring less than nothing for, the great prin- 
ciples which were so dear to the Covenanters. The 
consequence was that they were averse to every- 
thing distinctively evangelical. They had nothing 
but rebuke for those who were concerned in the re- 
publication and annotation of a book entitled "The 



150 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

Marrow of Modern Divinity," which with some ex- 
travagance of statement here and there put in the 
centre of its teaching the fact that God had made 
a gift of His Son Jesus Christ for salvation to man- 
kind sinners as such ; and they deposed the fathers 
of the Secession for their repudiation of Patronage. 
But they tolerated for years the Socinian teachings 
of Simpson, who was Professor of Theology in Glas- 
gow, and at length deprived him of his chair only 
when his own imprudent publication of his opin- 
ions rendered it impossible for them with decency 
to retain him. This does not look much like com- 
prehension, but it is only another illustration of the 
fact which history has often attested — that the intol- 
erance of so-called liberals is frequently the worst 
form of tyranny. 

With this hatred of evangelical truth — I speak of 
the party, not of individuals — there was ultimate- 
ly combined a devotion to the graces of style and 
rhetoric which was no doubt largely due to the law 
of reaction. In the preaching of the latter half of 
the seventeenth century little attention had been 
paid to literary matters. As Kainy has said : 
"Culture, development of literature, development 
of taste, deliberate adaptation of means to ends, had 



THE MODERATES AND EVANGELICALS. 151 

been wofully checked and marred. The peaceful 
processes by which those who teach and those who 
learn find out one another's meaning, the processes 
by which mind in each generation is laid under 
contribution for new and various services, had been 
sadly interrupted. ... A man who preached as he 
could and when he could, in a house or on a hill- 
side, was not likely to take much care of his style. 
And the habit of the pulpit had retained in point 
of fact much of the old dialect and much of the old 
way of dividing and arranging topics, [and] it did so 
at a time when in general literature the most rapid 
improvement was taking place in these very partic- 
ulars, an improvement which that age was rather 
disposed to overvalue." * 

Now the Moderate party, as a party, gave itself as- 
siduously to the cultivation of these literary graces, 
and much good would have come out of that if only 
it had been subordinated to the higher end of the 
proclamation of the Gospel. But the misfortune was 
that the Moderates put the means into the place of 
the end, so that in their hands the sermon became a 
mere literary product rather than an instrument for 

* " Three Lectures on the Church of Scotland," p. 77. Rob- 
ert Rainy, D.D., in reply to Dean Stanley. 



152 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

the conversion and edification of souls. No more 
striking exemplification of the sad influence which 
such a practice must have upon the efficiency of the 
pulpit can be found anywhere than in the history of 
the Scottish Moderates. First, there was made by 
them a modification of Christianity, so as to harmo- 
nize it with culture ; then there was developed a 
tendency to dwell rather on those things which are 
common to it with natural religion than on such 
things as are and always have been " a stumbling- 
block " to "the Jew" and "foolishness" to "the 
Greek." This was followed by a merely moral 
teaching, in which all doctrine was ignored, and dis- 
sertations on the virtues took the place of exposi- 
tions of the Scriptures, and that in its turn was 
succeeded in some quarters by something that was 
little more than the baldest Deism. The same de- 
velopment was seen, unless I have misunderstood 
all that I have read upon the subject, in New Eng- 
land, at the time of the Unitarian defection, and the 
two histories together utter a loud warning, which 
I trust you young men will heed, against allowing 
the secondary to usurp the place of the primary, 
and cultivating literature or scholarship to the neg- 
lect of that for the attainment of which alone in 



THE MODERATES AND EVANGELICALS. 153 

the pulpit these things are of any value. " The 
tody is more than raiment" The raiment, indeed, 
in its own place is not to be despised, and the cos- 
tume of a well-dressed gentleman is better by far 
than the blanket of the Indian ; but as a covering 
for the dead, neither is of any great consequence, 
for it is only the living body that gives importance 
to the raiment. So cultivate style, the style of your 
own times, the best style of your own times, for 
there is no need of adhering in that matter to any 
Quaker-like, stereotypic anachronism ; but see to it 
that the style clothes the living truth, and is meant 
not only for the expression, but also for the protec- 
tion of that truth, else the result will be as disas- 
trous with you as it was in Scotland. For the 
preaching of virtue, alas! did not make men virt- 
uous, and those vices which are said to be most 
common among the lower orders of the Scottish 
people, became more prevalent than ever under 
such instructors.* 

Of the Moderates, as preachers, the only man 
whose sermons have come down to us with any 

* See "The Scottish Philosophy," p. 19. James McCosh, 
D.D.,LL.D. 

7* 



154 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

great prestige is Dr. Hugh Blair. He was the 
great-grandson of that Robert Blair of St. Andrews 
whom the English merchant described as having 
shown him " the majesty of God/' and the son of an 
Edinburgh citizen. Born in 1718, he was educated 
at the university of his native city, and was licensed 
as a preacher in 1741. Within a year after that he 
was ordained to the charge of Colessie, in Fife ; 
thence, in 1743, he was translated to Edinburgh, 
where he labored first in the Canongate, then in 
Lady Yester's, and finally in the High Church, until 
his death in 1800, at the age of eighty-two. He 
was distinguished in his literary course for an essay 
" On the Beautiful," and at the taking of his mas- 
ter's degree for a thesis, " De f undamentis et obliga- 
tione legis nature," which his biographer says, w T ith 
great naivete, "exhibits in elegant Latin an outline 
of the moral principles which have since been more 
fully unfolded and illustrated in his sermons."* 
During the early years of his pastorate of the High 
Church he prepared and delivered a course of lect- 
ures on Rhetoric and Belles-lettres in the university, 
and he was subsequently appointed as professor of 

* James Finlayson, D.D., in sketch prefixed to the " Peo- 
ple's Edition " of Blair's Sermons, p. xii. 



THE MODERATES AND EVANGELICALS. 155 

these subjects to a chair which was founded and en- 
dowed for him by the Crown. It is evident from 
these facts that he had addicted himself, if not to 
literary pursuits, at least to the pursuit of literature, 
and that he belonged to that coterie of which the 
historian Robertson was the head, and which had 
the merit of originating and promoting that Renais- 
sance, as I may call it, of elegance and taste which 
made the Edinburgh of that age so remarkable.* 

Of his sermons, which were originally published 
in five volumes, it may be said that they were un- 
duly praised at the time of their appearance, and 
that they are as unduly neglected now. Samuel 
Johnson called them "auro magis aurei ;" and King 
George the Third, who was a great patron of Blair, 
and who gave him a pension of two hundred pounds 
a year, is reported to have often said that he wished 
to hear that the Bible and Blair's sermons were in 
the hands of every youth in the United Kingdom. 
These opinions from the leader of literature and the 
leader of fashion may perhaps account in some de- 
gree for the number of editions through which 
Blair's sermons passed ; while the fact that the dis- 

* See note at the end of this lecture. 



156 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

tinctive features of the Gospel are largely absent 
from them may explain the oblivion into which 
now the}' have fallen. But for style and method 
they may still be studied with advantage, though 
they do not now, of course, hold the same relatively 
high place in these respects which they did at the 
date of their publication. They have a distinctively 
modern cast, and his mode of opening up and di- 
viding a subject is often felicitous and suggestive. 
In matter, however, they are exceedingly defective. 
One is prepared to find that this will be the case 
from the very terms employed by the editor of 
the People's Edition in his preface, to this effect: 
" They treat of life and death, hell and judgment ; 
of the superintendence of an overruling Provi- 
dence who directs and governs all the affairs of this 
life; of the certainty of the Rewards which await 
the just who fulfil the precepts and obey the laws 
of their Creator and Redeemer; and the tremen- 
dous punishment which the wicked will suffer in 
another world who break His commandments and 
despise His statutes in this life." 

This is a fair representation of the contents of the 
volumes, and, as you perceive, these are all doctrines 
of merely natural religion ; for there is in the enu- 



THE MODERATES AND EVANGELICALS. 157 

meration no allusion whatever to the Cross of Christ, 
and the truths that either centre in or radiate from 
that. But it would be unjust to say that Blair did 
not believe in the Atonement, or that he absolutely 
never preached about it. Out of the ninety-one ser- 
mons which he printed, six were preached on occa- 
sion of the administration of the Lord's Supper, and 
in at least three or four of these we have such distinct 
and unqualified statements of the expiatory nature 
of the death of Christ as no Socinian could have 
made. But there is little allusion to that subject 
in the rest of the discourses. They treat of religion, 
virtue, piety, vice, etc., as abstractions; and we have 
dissertations on "The Disorder of the Passions," on 
" The Importance of Order in Conduct," on " Can- 
dor," on "The Love of Praise," on "Envy," on 
"Friendship," and the like; but we have not a 
word on Eepentance, Regeneration, or Faith, and, 
so far as I have discovered from a somewhat careful 
examination, there is no allusion to the existence or 
agency of the Holy Spirit in the whole five volumes. 
It would not be fair to say that he did not hold the 
Doctrine of the Atonement, but judging from his 
published sermons he certainly did not put it in 
the place which it occupies in the New Testament, 



158 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

and he did not hold it as Paul held it. His ser- 
mons were, for the most part, moral disquisitions 
without the background of the Cross, and all the 
beauty of style to which a man can attain will not 
make amends for the absence of that ; while, again, 
the absolute ignoring of the Holy Spirit must have 
deprived his utterances of power, for Keble has 
written no truer lines than these : 

"The spirit must still the darkling deep, 
The dove must light upon the cross, 
Else we should all sin on or sleep 
With Christ in view — turning our gain to loss." 

And if that be the case, even " with Christ in 
view," it must be so, d fortiori, when he is studi- 
ously kept out of sight. 

I remember hearing a shrewd Scotchman describe 
a minister of the Blair stamp as "a very innocent 
preacher," meaning thereby that he would do no 
great damage to Satan's kingdom in the world, and 
that was true ; but as far as the kingdom of Christ 
is concerned, w r e can predicate no such innocence 
of those who preach discourses of this type, for they 
lull souls into false security, and they prepare the 
way for still wider defection from the truth by oth- 
ers. And both of these effects were undeniably pro- 



THE MODERATES AND EVANGELICALS. 159 

duced by Blair and his associates ; for by-and-by the 
people lost their relish for the Gospel in its purity, 
and called its preachers " high-flyers," " enthusiasts," 
"zealots," and the like, because they asserted the 
depravity of the heart, and said to their hearers, as 
Jesus said to Nicodemus, " Ye must be born again." 
Nor was this all, for others began where Blair left 
off, and things must have come to a poor pass 
when David Hume could say to his friend Alexan- 
der Carlyle, the minister of Inveresk, after hearing 
him preach a sermon in the pulpit of John Home, 
the author of the tragedy of Douglas, " What did 
you mean by treating John's people to-day to one 
of Cicero's Academics? I did not think such 
heathen morality could have passed in East Lo- 
thian." It w r as bad enough when such a charge 
could be brought with truth against a preacher 
of the Gospel by any man ; it was worse that 
David Hume should have had it in his power to 
bring it ; but that he against whom it was brought 
should have esteemed it as an honor, and should 
have recorded it in his diary as such, was worst 
of all.* 

* "Autobiography of Dr. Alexander Carlyle," edited by J. H. 
Burton, p. 276. 



160 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

Even in this time of darkness, however, there 
were some who were " faithful found among the 
faithless ;" and of these the first in time, and among 
the foremost in influence, was Thomas Boston, au- 
thor of " The Fourfold State," a work which was 
for nearly a century a household hand-book of the- 
ology among the Scottish peasantry. Born at Duns 
in 1676, he had, as a little boy, kept his father com- 
pany when he was suffering in the jail of his native 
town for nonconformity. He was early brought 
under the power of. the truth through the instru- 
mentality of Henry Erskine, the father of the 
brothers Ebenezer and Ealph, who afterwards be- 
came the leaders of the Secession. He studied at 
the University of Edinburgh, and w T as licensed to 
preach in 1697, ordained over the little parish of 
Simprim in 1699, and transferred in 1707 to the 
parish of Ettrick, where he labored till his death, 
in 1732. His sermons, of which a large number 
were published, had few of the graces of style, 
either in composition or delivery, though here and 
there in them we come upon epigrammatic and 
suggestive sentences. They were cast, withal, in the 
mould of the times, beginning with a painful open- 
ing up of the text and a statement of the doctrine 



THE MODERATES AND EVANGELICALS. 161 

to be insisted upon ; then proceeding to an exposi- 
tion of that through four or five heads, each having 
under it a series of particulars, and the whole fol- 
lowed by an application in which was a series of 
uses — as, for example, in one case, taken almost at 
random — use first, for information ; use second, for 
trial ; use third, for motive. They show also, in 
the prominence which they give to the covenant of 
works and the covenant of grace, the influence of 
that close intercourse between the Church of Scot- 
land and the Church of Holland which was main- 
tained before, during, and for some little time after 
the era of the Persecution. They are not, there- 
fore, very attractive reading now, and will be resort- 
ed to only by those who are impelled to study them 
for some specific historic purpose. But they are 
full of Christ, and they are particularly noteworthy 
for the fulness and the freeness with which they 
press the offer of Christ and His salvation upon 
men. 

While visiting one of his parishioners he came 
upon a book called " The Marrow of Modern Divin- 
ity," which had been written by one Edward Fish- 
er, an Oxford scholar, and which had been brought, 
no one could tell how, when, or by whom, to the 



162 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

place immediately beneath the thatch in which it 
was discovered. There it had lain long, like the 
grain of wheat in the mummy's hand, but in the 
heart of Boston it took root and germinated. It 
was republished by one of Boston's friends, and 
twelve of the ministers of the Church were rebuked 
by the Assembly for giving their sanction to what 
Principal Hadow of St. Andrews alleged to be its 
errors. In the words of the elder McCrie, " The 
Marrow doctrine, while it holds forth a complete 
salvation, presents a revealed ground — call it an 
offer, or promise, or deed of gift, or grant from 
God, warranting sinners as such, irrespective of any 
decree, or any qualification connected with the de- 
cree, to believe in, receive, and rest upon Christ for 
all they need for their recovery and happiness." * 
Its author sometimes indulged in language which, 
unless qualified by what he had elsewhere said, 
might have been taken as implying that assurance 
is of the essence of faith, and that believers are not 
under obligation to obey the law. But from all 
such ambiguities and errors the Scottish "Marrow 
men," as. they were called, kept themselves free, 

* "The Evangelical Succession, " Second Series, p. 95. 



THE MODERATES AND EVANGELICALS. 163 

and the controversy which resulted from their pub- 
lication of the book only issued in giving a wider 
publicity to the truth which Boston and his breth- 
ren proclaimed. ' "Christ," said he, "is given to 
mankind sinners indefinitely ; not to the elect alone, 
but to sinners indefinitely elect or non-elect — sin- 
ners of the race of Adam, without exception." * 
Along with this he insisted most strenuously on the 
necessity of the agency of the Holy Spirit, and on 
the absolute essentialness of holy living as the fruit 
and evidence of regeneration ; and the result was 
seen in the quickening and sanctifying of many 
souls, not only in the parishes of the Marrow men, 
but all over the country. 

And the wine of this new life burst the old wine- 
skin within which it was confined. For the Mar- 
row controversy had really as much to do with the 
first Secession from the Scottish Church as Patron- 
age, and the doctrines which I have just described 
were from the beginning the leading characteristics 
of the theological teachings of the Seceders. By 
the brothers Ebenezer and Ralph Erskine, especial- 

* "The Evangelical Succession," Second Series, p. 94. 



164 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

ly, they were proclaimed with such power that they 
not only leavened the new denomination of which 
they were the leaders, but also did much to keep 
the lamp of truth from going out in many quarters 
of the land. The Secession itself dates from 1733 ; 
but Ebenezer Erskine had been in the ministry first 
at Portmoak, on the shore of Loch Leven, and after- 
wards at Stirling from 1703 ; and Ralph had been 
ordained in Dunfermline in 1711. They were, as I 
have already stated incidentally, the sons of Henry 
Erskine, who had been a sufferer both in England 
and Scotland from the tyranny of the Stuarts. They 
were educated at the University of Edinburgh, and 
were in every respect the peers of the ablest of their 
contemporaries. I have said enough about their 
secession in my introductory lecture, and must here 
confine myself to their influence as preachers. Of 
Ebenezer's discourses I have three volumes, and of 
Ralph's works ten, and all that I have said regard- 
ing Boston's sermons is equally true of these. Of 
the two, Ebenezer is the more stately, dignified, and 
measured, and Ralph the more fervid and full of 
unction, especially in the closing appeals, which ex- 
cel everything of the kind which I have read of 
that age, except it may be those of Baxter ; not cer- 



THE MODERATES AND EVANGELICALS. 1G5 

tainly in literary style, but in the wonderful free- 
ness and power with which he presses sinners to 
accept of Christ. One said of Ebenezer : " If you 
have never heard him preach, then you have never 
heard the Gospel in its majesty ;" and after reading 
these applications at the end of Ralph's discourses 
I am almost disposed to say that if you have never 
read them, you have never read the Gospel in its 
freeness. 

The sermons of both were fully written out, and 
were delivered memoriter / for Ebenezer says in the 
preface to one of them which he published, because 
he had been accused of saying something in it which 
he had not said, " It is my practice to write all that 
I have a mind to say in public. It is true, indeed, 
I do not pretend to such an exact memory as that 
I can confine myself in the delivery to everything 
in my notes without varying a word, but yet I used 
to be pretty exact that way." Of Ralph, one of his 
biographers says that, "for the most part, he wrote 
all and kept close to his notes" (that is, delivered 
memoriter precisely as he had written), " though if 
anything was given him in the moment of utterance 
he could avail himself of that also." He had a 
metaphysical mind, and excelled in making accurate 



166 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

distinctions — a quality which especially comes out in 
his work entitled "Faith no Fancy" — which even 
such philosophers as Hamilton and McCosh have 
spoken of with approbation. Singularly enough, in 
combination with that philosophic acumen, he had 
something also of the poetic faculty, and his Gospel 
Sonnets, despite the uncouthness of the rhymes and 
the oddness of the conceits which are constantly re- 
curring, do yet contain some ingenious and strik- 
ing thoughts, rising up, as in his verses on the " Con- 
test in Heaven," to at least the verge of the sub- 
lime. They used to be very popular in rural Scot- 
tish homes, and in my boyhood I have heard them 
quoted with much unction by ministers in their ad- 
dresses at the communion-table. 

But for the Secession the influence of these two 
brothers would have been confined mainly to their 
own immediate neighborhoods ; but the travels and 
preachings incidental to the planting and organiz- 
ing of new congregations in the new denomination 
took them to districts in all quarters of the land, 
and wherever they went their word was with pow- 
er. Thus the very efforts of the Moderates to 
stamp out the flame only scattered the sparks in 
different directions, where the hearts of the people 



THE MODERATES AND EVANGELICALS. 167 

being already prepared for their reception, caught 
fire from them and burned with a devout enthusi- 
asm. 



While the Erskines and their coadjutors were 
laboring thus outside of the National Church, there 
were some eminent men of devoted Christian spir- 
it and earnest Evangelical faith who deserve to 
be held in honorable remembrance for their noble 
work within its pale. Among these, perhaps the 
foremost place must be given to John M aclattrin, 
who was born in Argyleshire in 1693, educated in 
Glasgow and Leyden, and ordained at Luss, on the 
banks of Loch Lomond, in 1719, whence he was trans- 
ferred to the North-west parish in Glasgow, where 
he labored till his death, in 1754. Some of his ser- 
mons were given to the world by his son-in-law af- 
ter his death, and they must be classed among the 
greatest which were published in the eighteenth 
century in the English language. They are thor- 
oughly evangelical in their substance, but much 
more attractive in their style than those of Boston 
and the Erskines. They have a grandeur and mas- 
siveness about them which are quite remarkable, and 
they abound in original, profound, and suggestive 



168 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

thought. Dr. John Brown, of Edinburgh, was fond 
of quoting from them, and he usually introduced 
his citation by styling Maclaurin " the first of our 
Scottish theologians," or " the profound Maclaurin ;" 
and of his discourse on "Glorying in the Cross," 
which Dr. Eadie has called " one of the noblest in 
the language," Dr. Brown has said that it exhibits 
" the glories of the cross of Christ with a depth of 
spiritual understanding and feeling, and a force of 
argument and eloquence, seldom equalled, and still 
more seldom combined." It is free from all the 
mannerisms that w r ere so common in the preaching 
of that age, and marches on with a stately step and 
solemn cadence worthy of its theme. Ornate in 
language without being diffuse, it is literally packed 
with meaning and lustrous with clearness. We 
have no description of his manner, and cannot tell 
whether he read his discourses or delivered them 
from memory, but if given with anything like the 
condensed power with which it is written, such a pas- 
sage as the following must have produced a great 
effect upon his hearers: "Here shine spotless jus- 
tice, incomprehensible wisdom, and infinite love, all 
at once. None of these darkens or eclipses the oth- 
ers ; every one of them gives a lustre to the rest. 



THE MODERATES AND EVANGELICALS. 169 

They mingle their beams with united eternal splen- 
dor — the just Judge, the merciful Father, and the 
wise Governor. No other object gives such a dis- 
play of all these perfections ; yea, all the objects we 
know give not such a display of any one of them. 
Nowhere does justice appear so awful, mercy so 
amiable, or wisdom so profound." See how every 
word tells. There is not a superfluous syllable. 
No epithets are used for padding. Every clause is 
a distinct thought. Thus the discourse moves on, 
gathering force as it goes, and well sustaining the 
weight even of such a theme. Indeed, if Maclaurin 
errs at all, it is in the condensation of his thought 
into the briefest expression. We do not feel that 
lie is obscure as we read, but some of his listeners, 
complained that he was difficult to follow as they 
heard ; and we must not forget Whateley's cau- 
tion, that " bulk is needful to digestion," and that 
judicious expansion is sometimes as powerful as 
a condensed epigram. 

Maclaurin wrote also some valuable essays on 
6uch subjects as " The Prejudices of men against 
the Gospel " and " The Scripture Doctrine of Di- 
vine Grace;" and perhaps most interesting of all to 
ns here is the fact that he was a correspondent of 



170 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

Jonathan Edwards, and was, like him, distinguished 
for the part he took in the revival of religion. 
When the fathers of the Secession so strangely 
quarrelled with Whitefield, because, during his visit 
to Scotland, he would not confine his ministrations 
to their pulpits, Maclaurin was full of joy at his 
work, and personally co-operated with those who 
carried on the movement which he began at Cam- 
buslang. He was the chief contriver and promoter 
of the " concert for prayer " which had been acceded 
to by numbers both in Great Britain and America, 
and for which Edwards wrote one of his Treatises/* 
There can be no doubt, therefore, that the influence 
of Maclaurin was very largely effective in keeping 
the truth before the minds of the people in the 
west of Scotland during the early portion of the 
Moderate ascendancy. His writings have been re- 
cently republished under the editorship of the Rev. 
Dr. Goold, of Edinburgh, and they may still be 
studied with advantage by those who are preparing 
for or actually engaged in the work of the ministry. 



* The title of Edwards's treatise is, " An humble Attempt to 
promote explicit Agreement and visible Union of God's Peo- 
ple in Extraordinary Prayer for the Revival of Religion and 
the Advancement of Christ's Kingdom on Earth>" 



THE MODERATES AND EVANGELICALS. 171 

Another of the earnest spirits in the Scottish 
Church at this time was John Witherspoon, a lineal 
descendant of John Knox. He was born in 1722, 
educated at the University of Edinburgh, and set- 
tled first at Beith, in Ayrshire, then at Paisley, in 
Renfrewshire. He was. an effective and popular 
preacher. His works on Justification and Regen- 
eration are not unknown even in these da3 r s, and 
show the manner of man he was in the pulpit. 
But there was a vein of satire in him which came 
out in his volume entitled "Ecclesiastical Charac- 
teristics," in which the Moderates were held up to 
ridicule in the raciest style. But the sting of the 
wit was mostly in its truth, and that made him 
many enemies, who were in no degree mollified by 
a second volume, which he issued in defence of the 
first. On one occasion, however, his zeal outran 
his discretion, for hearing that on the night pre- 
vious to the communion a set of youths held a 
meeting in Paisley, at which they travestied the 
preaching and praying and the dispensation of the 
Supper, he delivered and published a sermon on 
the matter, giving the names of the offenders. 
This subjected him to an action at law in which 
he was cast in costs ; and shortly afterwards, hav- 



172 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT." 

ing received an invitation to succeed Edwards in 
the presidency of Princeton College, lie transferred 
himself to this country, where he did admirable 
service both in Church and State, and where his 
name is still held in honor as that of one of the 
signers of the Declaration of Independence. In 
him, as in John Mason, the pulpits of Scotland and 
America touched each other. As in the vine of 
Joseph the branches ran over the wall, so the Scot- 
tish pulpit, through these noble men, spread over 
into this land and enriched it with its fruit. 

Mention ought also to be made of such men as 
Willison of Dundee, the elder Sir Henry Mon- 
crieff, and others, but we must pass over them to 
make room for Dr. John Erskine, of Edinburgh — 
not to be confounded with the Secession brothers 
of the same surname. Born in 1721, he was the 
son of a distinguished Scottish lawyer,* and was 
educated at the University of Edinburgh. He be- 
came minister of the parish of Kirkintilloch in 
1744, and was transferred in 1758 to Edinburgh, 
where he was pastor first of New Grey friars and 
finally of Old G-reyfriars, in the latter of which he 

* He was the author of the "Institutes of the Law of Scot- 
laud, ''and is still frequently called " The Scottish Blackstone. " 



THE MODERATES AND EVANGELICALS. 173 

was the colleague of Principal Robertson, the his- 
torian. He was for long the leader of the Evan- 
gelicals in the Assembly, as Robertson was of the 
Moderates, and was distinguished alike for his abil- 
ity as a preacher, his earnestness as a Christian, and 
his zeal for liberty as a citizen. He, too, was a cor- 
respondent of Edwards, and his was the first voice 
raised in Scotland against the monstrous injustice 
of the war which the government of Great Britain 
entered upon with her North American colonies, 
and which resulted in the independence of these 
United States. Hugh Miller says that his tract, 
" Shall I go to War with my American Brethren ?" 
is among the most powerful of his productions.* 
He published many able works in practical and doc- 
trinal theology, and died in 1803. The father of 
Sir Walter Scott was one of his elders, and the 
most accurate and striking description of his public 
ministrations, is given by the great novelist, very 
evidently from personal familiarity with that which 
he portrays, in the following paragraph, which I 
extract from " Guy Mannering :" f " The colleague 

* See the volume of Miller's works entitled "Headship of 
Christ," p. 147. 
t "Guy Mannering," chap, xxxvii. 



174 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

of Dr. Eobertson ascended the pulpit. His exter- 
nal appearance was not prepossessing. A remark- 
ably fair complexion, strangely contrasted with a 
black wig without a grain of powder; a narrow 
chest, and a stooping posture ; hands which, placed 
like props on either side of the pulpit, seemed nec- 
essary rather to support the person than to assist 
the gesticulation of the preacher — no gown, not 
even that of Geneva, a tumbled band, and a gesture 
which seemed scarce voluntary, were the first cir- 
cumstances which struck a stranger. ... A lecture 
was delivered, fraught with new, striking, and enter- 
taining views of Scripture history — a sermon in 
which the Calvinism of the Kirk of Scotland was 
ably supported, j r et made the basis of a sound sys- 
tem of practical morals which should neither shelter 
the sinner under the cloak of speculative faith or of 
peculiarity of opinion, nor leave him loose to the 
waves of unbelief and schism. Something there 
was of an antiquated turn of argument and meta- 
phor, but it only served to give zest and peculiarity 
to the style of elocution. The sermon was not 
read — a scrap of paper containing the heads of the 
discourse was occasionally referred to, and the 
enunciation, which at first seemed imperfect and 



THE MODERATES AND EVANGELICALS. 175 

embarrassed, became, as the preacher warmed in 
his progress, animated and distinct ; and although 
the discourse could not be quoted as a correct speci- 
men of pulpit eloquence, yet Mannering had seldom 
heard so much learning, metaphysical acuteness, and 
energy of argument brought into the service of 
Christianity. 'Such,' he said, going out of the 
church, f must have been the preachers to whose 
unfearing minds and acute though sometimes rude- 
ly exercised talents we owe the Reformation. 5 " 

The era of Moderate ascendancy was now ap- 
proaching its zenith. It culminated in the famous 
debate on Missions in the General Assembly of 
1796, of which Hugh Miller has given a graphic de- 
scription in a series of valuable articles,* and which 
ended in the defeat of the friends of missions, who 
were led by Dr. Erskine, of whom we have just 
spoken. But a reaction was at hand, and the fore- 
most place in the production of that must be given 
to Andrew Thomson, whose name is still venerated 
in his native land. He was born at Sanquhar in 
1779, where his father was then minister of the 

* See "The Headship of Christ/' ubi supra. 



176 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

parish church ; and after some years spent at Mar- 
kinch, in Fife, to which his father had removed, he 
was educated at the University of Edinburgh, and 
ordained to the ministry in 1802 at Sprouston, 
whence in 1808 he was removed to Perth, and 
thence in 1810 to Edinburgh, where he labored first 
in the New Greyfriars Church, and afterwards in 
St. George's, until his death on his own door-step in 
1831, at the comparatively early age of fifty-two. 

We have seen that the early Moderates devoted 
their attention to the cultivation of the graces of 
literature to the exclusion of the Gospel, and that 
the early Evangelicals, with but few conspicuous 
exceptions, confined themselves almost exclusively 
to the presentation of the Gospel, after a certain 
stereotyped and systematic fashion, with little or no 
regard to elegance of style or manner. Their dis- 
courses were bald in illustration, and broken up 
into fragments by numerous divisions and subdi- 
visions, which prevented their attaining anything 
like climatic force. They were, besides, frequently 
delivered in a drawling, sing-song chant — a kind of 
" holy tone," as some irreverently called it — which 
was exceeding unnatural. Thus both parties had 
run into an extreme ; and though, of the two, that 



THE MODERATES AND EVANGELICALS. 177 

of the Moderates was by far the worse, yet it has to 
be noted that the habits into which the Evangelicals 
had allowed themselves to fall, tended to alienate 
the cultivated and refined from their ministrations. 
However unnecessary it may seem to some in 
these days, there was then undeniable occasion for 
the protest against divorcing evangelical truth from 
literary culture, which was so forcibly uttered by 
John Foster in his " Essay on the Aversion of Men 
of Taste to Evangelical Religion," and it must be 
confessed that in Scotland the Evangelicals had 
grievously erred in this particular. Even Ralph 
Erskine, whose general scholarship might have en- 
abled him to excel in this department, instead of 
attempting to conciliate or attract cultivated minds 
by his attention to literary elegance, accounted it as 
an evidence of spiritual defection in the community 
that, as he said, "a world of people that come under 
the name of wits, and people of fine taste, are pleased 
with no sermons but such as are artificially decked 
with the flowers of gaudy rhetoric and tricky ora- 
tory, and this comes to be preferred to plain, pow- 
erful, spiritual preaching." * The good man refers 

* " Works," vol. ii.,p. 250. 

8* 



178 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

to Paul's allegation to the Corinthians, that he had 
not come to them with "wisdom of words;" but in 
the same Epistle the same apostle declares that " he 
was made all things to all men, that he might by 
all means save some," and he would have been vast- 
ly wiser if, without in any way concealing the truth 
from view, he had striven by the " craft" of literary 
grace to catch such men with " guile." 

Now it was the merit of Andrew Thomson that 
he brought back culture into the pulpit without in 
the least degree obscuring the Cross. The Gospel 
was always in the central and highest place in his 
discourses, but he clothed it in attractive forms, and 
was as eminent for the beauty of his composition 
as any of the best writers of his day; while the 
force of his eloquence was not surpassed save by 
the irresistible oratory of Chalmers. In point of 
fact, he began the work which Chalmers carried for- 
ward to its consummation, and there are few nobler 
names in the Ecclesiastical History of Scotland than 
those of these two men who were for a time con- 
temporaries and friends. Neither of them would 
have placed literature above the Gospel, but both 
believed that they should serve the Lord with their 
best, and that it was their duty to set forth the 



THE MODERATES AND EVANGELICALS, 179 

doctrines of the Cross in the form best fitted to se- 
cure the attention of their hearers. It had come to 
be the belief of a large part of the community that 
to be an Evangelical was a mark of intellectual 
weakness and literary nncouthness; but in Thom- 
son they beheld one who in both of these respects 
was equal, if not superior, to the ablest lawyer or 
author in the land, and they were in a manner com- 
pelled to respect the position which he took. 

While, therefore, the history of the Moderate pul- 
pit gives emphatic warning of the evil which must 
ensue from the cultivation of the means as if they 
were the end, that of the Evangelical pulpit thus 
far is no less emphatic in its exposure of the danger 
of neglecting altogether the proper adjustment of 
means to the end. There is here a case for the ap- 
plication of the Saviour's words, " This ought ye to 
have done, and not to have left the other undone." 
The primary obligation is to preach the Gospel — that 
ought to be done ; the secondary is not to neglect all 
proper means for so preaching it that people will 
be drawn to listen to and believe it— that ought not 
to be left undone. There will be always offence in 
the cross to the natural heart, but the preacher's aim 
ought ever to be to secure that he does not add to 



180 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

that by any negligence or slovenliness or ungrace- 
f ulness of his own either in writing or in utterance. 
Reverting to the illustration which we have already 
used, "the hody is more than raiment" but the 
raiment is not, therefore, of no consequence. With 
the Moderates too often there was nothing but rai- 
ment, and the result was a "tailor's dummy" — the 
garments exquisitely cut and admirably made, but 
no living form within them. With the Evangeli- 
cals far too frequently the raiment was ragged and 
torn, evoking the ridicule of the spectators, and 
leaving the living body bare in many places to the 
sarcasm of the scorner. Between these two ex- 
tremes the ideal preacher will choose to adopt that 
dress for his message which shall best commend it 
to all classes, and defend it from all assault. 

This was the course Dr. Andrew Thomson adopt- 
ed, and for success in it he was singularly w r ell en- 
dowed. He had a fine, manly presence, a wonder- 
ful ear for music, in which he was a great proficient, 
a voice of surpassing power and flexibility, and an 
exquisite sense of rhythmic harmony in the selec- 
tion of words. He had a commanding intellect, a 
thorough knowledge of the world, unwavering faith 
in the great principles of the Gospel, and unflinch- 



THE MODERATES AND EVANGELICALS, 181 

ing boldness combined with wonderful tact in the 
advocacy of unpopular truth. As Lord Moncrief 
said lately, " he was one of those orators who made 
your heart palpitate to hear." * Up till the time of 
his entering on the ministry of St. George's he had 
not been in the habit of writing his discourses, but, 
after premeditation, had trusted to his natural flu- 
ency, when heated by the fire of the pulpit, to sup- 
ply him with the expressions which he needed. 
But when he went to his new charge, and sought 
to gather round him the best minds in the city, he 
changed his method and wrote two discourses every 
week, which he read from his manuscript in the 
pulpit. But the freedom of his off-hand manner 
remained, so that even when reading his eye was 
everywhere among the people, and he kept himself 
thoroughly en rajpport with them. It was of im- 
mense consequence just then, not only that he 
should give diligent preparation to his discourses, 
but also that it should le seen and known of all 
that he had done so, and the result showed that he 
had judged wisely, for the effect of his attention to 
these matters was very soon apparent. Lockhart, in 

* Address at the Centenary of Chalmers in 1880. 



182 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

his " Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk," has described 
it thus: "I am assured that church -going was a 
thing comparatively out of fashion among the fine 
folks of the New Town of Edinburgh till this man 
was removed from a church he formerly held in 
the Old Town, and established under the splendid 
dome of St. George's. Only two or three years 
have elapsed since this change took place, and yet, 
though he was at first received with no inconsid- 
erable coolness by the self-complacent gentry of the 
new parish, and although he adopted nothing that 
ordinary people would have supposed likely to over- 
come this coolness, he has already entirely subdued 
their prejudices, and enjoys at this moment a de- 
gree of favor among all classes of his auditors such 
as very seldom falls to the share of such a man in 
such a place." * And having seen the great efficacy 
of this alteration of his method of preparing for 
the pulpit and preaching in it, he would not allow 
himself to be tempted back by any considerations 
of personal ease to his former practice. Perhaps 
he had begun to discover, even before his removal 
to St. George's, that there may be a fluency which 

* " Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk," vol. iii., pp. 19, 80. 



THE MODERATES AND EVANGELICALS. 183 

is ultimately fatal to pulpit power. In any case, 
he prepared to the last with utmost care; and a 
good story is told of him in this connection which 
I repeat here because it may fix in your memories 
this great lesson of his example. A minister who 
was a keen angler once said to him, " I wonder you 
spend so much time on your sermons, with your 
ability and ready speech. Many's the time I've 
both written a sermon and killed a salmon before 
breakfast." " Well, sir," replied Thomson, " I would 
rather have eaten your salmon than listened to your 
sermon I" * 

He believed in the utilization of the press as 
well as of the pulpit, and through the pages of 
The Christian Instructor — a monthly magazine 
of which he was the founder and first editor, and 
in which he was greatly assisted by his Dissent- 
ing friend, Dr. Thomas McCrie, the biographer of 
Knox- — he did much to mould the religious opin- 
ion of his time, and to secure the ultimate triumph 
of the Evangelical party in the Scottish Church. 
But it was on the platform that his most splendid 
oratorical victories were won. For that kind of 

* "Life of Andrew Thomson, B,D,," p. 24. Jean L. Watson. 



184 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

eloquence lie had many qualifications. He had a 
clear perception of the weak points in an adversa- 
ry's case and the strong positions in his own. He 
had great fluency of speech and thorough command 
of himself. He had the richest humor, and a stock 
of anecdotes of the raciest sort, which seemed to 
come up just where they could be most effectively 
employed, reminding us in this of Guthrie more 
than any other of his successors. He had a keen 
vein of satire, too, which could be playful and 
harmless on occasion as summer lightning, but 
which was often also forked and deadly, like the 
bolt that rends the forest oak. Frequently in the 
Assembly and on the platform he spoke for two or 
three hours at a stretch ; and when some one re- 
marked on the length of time he had in one such 
instance kept up the attention of the people, he 
replied, "Whenever I see them get dull I throw 
in a story. I consider a story has an effect for 
twenty minutes." * Sometimes he gave way to ir- 
ritability and vehemence, for he had the sensitive 
organization of the orator ; but he was always 
ready to make reparation or retraction if he had 

* "Life of Andrew Thomson, D.D.," uU supra, p. 82. 



THE MODERATES AND EVANGELICALS. 185 

been unjust, for he had the spirit of the Christian. 
He took a prominent part in the once famous 
Apocrypha controversy, occasioned by the circu- 
lation in certain places by the British and Foreign 
Bible Society of the Apocrypha bound up with the 
Word of God, and he was the fearless advocate of 
the emancipation of the slave. Indeed, one speech 
made by him on that subject became historic, and 
long as this lecture has been, I must detain you a 
very few minutes more while I give you some idea 
of its power. 

It was in October, 1830. A great public meet- 
ing had been convened in Edinburgh, with a view 
to the securing of the gradual abolition of slavery 
in the British Colonies, and Francis Jeffrey had 
made a speech in which he moved that a petition 
be sent to Parliament praying that every child of 
slaves born after the 31st of December, 1831, should 
be declared free. Thomson was present, but to the 
surprise of every one he had taken his seat in the 
body of the house and not on the platform. When 
the motion was put he rose, and was immediately 
requested by the Lord Provost, who was in the 
chair, to go upon the platform; but with a look 
of drollery on his face he said^ " I cannot do that, 



186 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

for I am going to speak against your resolutions." 
The audience could not understand his opposing 
the abolition of slavery ; but when he went on to 
explain that he was opposed to gradual emancipa- 
tion, and insisted on its being immediate, enforcing 
that view with a power and pathos quite beyond 
his usual eloquence, he fairly captured the meeting. 
He was importuned to make a motion for imme- 
diate emancipation, but the confusion became so 
great that the Lord Provost left the chair, and after 
a while it was agreed to adjourn to another da} r , 
when both parties should have it out. When the 
appointed time arrived he had to confront a divided 
house. There were some who were sincerely op- 
posed to his proposal, and there were others, prin- 
cipally young men from the University, who were 
simply bent on mischief. But one who w r as present 
says, "In less than twenty minutes the entire meet- 
ing was with him, including the youthful malcon- 
tents, whom I was amused and delighted to observe 
laughing as heartily at his bright and genial humor, 
and cheering as enthusiastically his reiterated bursts 
of eloquence, as any in the hall."* He continued 

* " Life of Andrew Thomson, D.D.," uU supra, pp. 113, 
114. 



THE MODERATES AND EVANGELICALS. 187 

for a long while, and lie concluded with the follow- 
ing passage — a speech which was so irresistible in its 
force that not only Edinburgh but the whole coun- 
try was moved, and the cry for immediate emanci- 
pation, which he was the first to raise, was echoed 
and re-echoed until it entered the British House of 
Commons, and that Act was passed which will stand 
in history forever, side by side with the Emanci- 
pation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln, as the 
beginning of justice to the colored race. 

Here is the peroration : "As a proof of the neces- 
sity of gradual emancipation, Mr. C tells us the 

old story of a man who had been confined for thir- 
ty years in the Bastile, and who, when liberated at 
the destruction of that horrid State-prison, became 
more miserable by the suddenness of his transition, 
and adds that his liberators would have been more 
rational and more humane had they provided an asy- 
lum to receive him. This I agree with Mr. C • 

in thinking they ought to have done ; but the anal- 
ogy does not hold, for instead of proposing that 
the slaves should be turned adrift and cared for no 
more, we propose that such arrangements shall be 
made as are suited to the exigencies of their con- 
dition. This is what our petition prays for along 



188 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

with their emancipation. It is what they are en- 
titled to in equity as well as in compassion, and far 
be it from us to say or do anything that would 

disparage such a claim. Bat really Mr. C does 

not seem to entertain adequate ideas on the sub- 
ject. 'His eye, 5 says he, 'could not bear the ef- 
fulgence of day, because its physical structure had 
accommodated itself to the glimmering of a gloomy 
cell.' It is really trifling with the subject to talk 
thus gravely on the man's eye being unable to bear 
the daylight, for that is the plain meaning of the 
words. Why, sir, a green shade would have an- 
swered the purpose; and then, sir, I would infinite- 
ly rather be a free man with my eyes hermetically 
sealed against all the beauties of the earth, and all 
the magnificence of the firmament, than I would be 
a slave with my eyes wide open to look upon my 
chains that were never to be broken, and upon my 
taskmasters who were never to have done with op- 
pressing me, and upon my dearest kindred who 
were either enjoying a blessing from which I was 
forever excluded, or to be my fellow-sufferers with- 
out hope, under the basest and bitterest of all hu- 
man degradation. 

" But if you push me, and still urge the argu- 



THE MODERATES AND EVANGELICALS. 189 

ment of insurrection and bloodshed, for which you 
are far more indebted to fancy than to fact, as I 
have shown you, then I say, be it so. I repeat that 
maxim, taken from a heathen book, but pervading 
the whole Book of God, ' Fiat justitia ruat ccelum.' 
Righteousness, sir, is the pillar of the universe. 
Break down that pillar and the universe falls into 
ruin and desolation ; but preserve it, and though 
the fair fabric be dilapidated — it may be rebuilt and 
repaired — it will be rebuilt and repaired, and re- 
stored to all its pristine strength and magnificence 
and beauty. If there must be violence, let it even 
come, for it will soon pass away ; let it come and 
rage its little hour, since it is to be succeeded 
by lasting freedom and prosperity and happiness. 
Give me the hurricane rather than the pestilence. 
Give me the hurricane, with its thunder, and its 
lightning, and its tempest; give me the hurricane, 
with its partial and temporary devastations, awful 
though they be ; give me the hurricane, with its 
purifying, healthful, salutary effects ; give me that 
hurricane infinitely rather than the noisome pesti- 
lence whose path is never crossed, whose silence is 
never disturbed, wdiose progress is never arrested 
by one sweeping blast from the heavens; which 



190 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

walks peacefully and sullenly through the length 
and breadth of the land, breathing poison into every 
heart and carrying havoc into every home; enerva- 
ting all that is strong, defacing all that is beautiful, 
and casting its blight over the fairest and happiest 
scenes of human life ; and which, from day to day, 
and from year to year, with intolerant and inter- 
minable malignity, sends its thousands and its tens 
of thousands of hapless victims into the ever-yawn- 
ing and never-satisfied grave." * 

After hearing one read such an outburst of elo- 
quence we are reminded of the saying of ^Eschines : 
"If such be its effect when repeated by another, 
what must it have been to have heard it from his 
own burning lips ?" 

Note. See page 155. 

The Literary Eminence of the Moderates. 

The highest estimate of the literary service rendered by the 
Moderate party to Scotland that I have seen is that of Dr. Peter 
Bayne, in his "Life and Letters of Hugh Miller," which I here 
append, that I may not seem to be guilty of doing them an in- 
justice. I cannot agree with all that Dr. B. has said in their 
behalf, and as I rewrite his sentences I try to imagine what 
Hugh Miller himself would have exclaimed had he dreamed 
that such a panegyric on them should have found a place in a 
memoir of him ; but let it be allowed " quantum valeat." 

* "Life of Andrew Thomson, D. D.," ubi supra, pp. 85-88. 



NOTE. 191 

" One knows not where to look in ecclesiastical history for 
a party of which the nucleus consisted of clergymen so loyal 
to the higher aims of the human spirit, so ardent in its love of 
knowledge, so free from sectarian bigotry, so genial and toler- 
ant in its habits of thought and feeling, as the Scottish Moder- 
ates. Under their influence the rugged face of old Scottish 
Presbyterianism mantled with a smile of calm and bright in- 
telligence, which drew upon Scotland the astonished gaze of 
Europe. Eobertson was in his own day known in Paris al- 
most as well as in Edinburgh ; his books had an honored place 
in the library of Voltaire, and there is no university in Europe 
at this hour in which his name is not held in high esteem. He 
was the friend and historical rival of Hume, who, except in his 
speculative philosophy, was a true Moderate. If it is to be 
held a disgrace to the party that its chiefs were in friendly in- 
tercourse with the prince of iconoclasts, we ought to remember 
that there went out also from the Moderate camp those cham- 
pions who, both in the field of pure philosophy and in that of 
apologetic divinity, challenged Hume to the combat, and in 
the judgment of a world certainly not prejudiced in favor of 
parsons and against philosophers, put Hume to his mettle. I 
allude, of course, to Principal Campbell and Dr. Reid. The 
philosophy of Reid assaulted Hume along his whole line of bat- 
tle. Interpreted as Hamilton interprets it, that philosophy is 
one in fundamentals with every great constructive system of 
spiritual thought from that of Plato to that of Kant. It con- 
sists, in one word, of an intelligent and critical appeal to the 
common spiritual nature — call it communis sensus, call it reason, 
call it intuition, call it what you will — of the human race. 
This remains, and must remain, whatever the dialect in w T hich 
you express it, the sole philosophical refuge from universal 
scepticism. It is characteristic of the noble tolerance and can- 
dor and high intellectual serenity of those old Moderates, that 
Reid forwarded to Hume in manuscript his reply to the philos- 
opher. A finer proof of a desire to deal fairly with an oppo- 
nent, and of an absolute rejection of every weapon of personal 



192 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

or vituperative controversy, cannot be imagined. Bat the Mod- 
erate party of the Scottish Church can claim not only Campbell, 
Reid, and Robertson, but one who would now be placed by 
many higher than either of the three — the author of "The 
Wealth of Nations. " Smith's " Theory of Moral Sentiments " 
is a thoroughly Moderate book; moderate in its eloquent and 
high-toned moralizing, moderate in its lucidity and logical co- 
herence, and also, perhaps, in its want of intensity, enthusiasm, 
and penetrating, exhaustive power. It was under the genial 
auspices of the Moderate party that the Scottish universities 
attained to such renown that young Palmerston and Russell 
went from England to study in their halls. It was under the 
auspices of the Moderate party that Edinburgh became the 
AYeimar of Great Britain, that the most important publications 
of the time in Europe—the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood 
and the Quarterly— arose. When John Murray conceived the 
scheme of the Quarterly, his first step was to start tor the north 
to confer with Scott and the literati of Edinburgh. The lead- 
ers of Moderatism showed a wise and nobly patriotic spirit in 
never trying to exclude Seceders from the universities. They 
indulged the shrewd preference of the Scottish commonalty 
for "college- bred ministers, " and spared their country the 
stunted and acrid growths of illiterate Dissent. It may doubt- 
less be argued that Moderatism was itself but part of a wider 
phenomenon, to wit, the prevalence and predominance through- 
out society, not Scottish and English alone, but European, dur- 
ing the eighteenth century, of literary and scientific tastes and 
ambitions as contrasted with those of a religious nature; but 
the truth of this statement does not neutralize the fact that, 
under the reign of Moderatism, a literary and philosophical 
lustre was thrown over Scotland, for which, in the mere epoch 
of dominant Evangelicanism, we look in vain."— "Life, and 
Letters of Hugh Miller;' vol. ii., pp. 187-189. 

There is much in these sentences to provoke criticism and 
challenge dissent. They give an exaggerated impression, not 
so much by putting in that which did not exist as by leav- 



NOTE. 193 

ing out a great deal -which subtracted from the undeniable 
excellencies of the party in many respects,, One needs not go 
further than the volume of Miller's own articles on "The 
Headship of Christ " in proof of what we have said ; but the quo- 
tations already given in these pages from McCosh, Lindsay, and 
Alexander, put some deep shadows into the picture which Dr. 
Bayne has drawn. In literature and philosophy the Moderates 
were worthy of all the praise they here receive, but they were 
a religious party, and must be finally judged by their influence 
on the religious life of the land. 

9 



VI. 

THOMAS CHALMERS. 

At the time of Dr. Andrew Thomson's death, 
Thomas Chalmers, the greatest of Scottish preach- 
ers, had been for some years Professor of Theology 
in the University of Edinburgh, and had, indeed, 
finished that unique and most instructive succession 
of pastorates which comprised what may be termed 
the ministerial portion of his wonderful career. He 
was born in Anstruther, in the county of Fife, on 
the 17th of March, 1780, and after an ordinary 
course of instruction at the parish school he entered 
the University of St. Andrews at the age of twelve. 
His juvenility made it impossible for him to take 
the full advantage of the classical portion of the 
curriculum, which then extended over the first two 
years of the college course, and it was not until the 
third year of his undergraduate life that his intel- 
lect really awoke. The first study which thorough- 
ly interested him was mathematics, in which he be- 
came highly proficient, and for which he retained a 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 195 

liking till the last. But lie was drawn almost as 
eagerly to the departments of ethics and politics, 
for it was the seething time of the French Kevolu- 
tion, and he was well-nigh swept from his moorings, 
such as they were at that time, by Godwin's work 
on Political Justice. 

From such a fate, however, he was saved by the 
influence on him, in the first year of his theological 
course, of Jonathan Edwards's famous " Treatise on 
the Freedom of the Will," which gave him such 
views of the personality, the greatness, the love, the 
wisdom, and the all-pervading energy of God, that 
he described himself long after as having "spent 
a twelvemonth in a sort of mental elysium," and 
said " that not a single hour elapsed in which the 
overpoweringly impressive imagination did not stand 
out bright before the inward eye ; and that his cus- 
tom was to wander early in the morning into the 
country, that amid the quiet scenes of nature he 
might luxuriate in the glorious conception." It 
was at that time the custom in the University of 
St. Andrews that all the members assembled daily 
in the public hall for morning and evening prayers, 
which were conducted by the theological students 
in regular order ; and such was the eloquence with 



196 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

which on these occasions Chalmers was accustomed 
to express his sense of the glory of the Divine at- 
tributes, that the citizens of the place flocked into 
the assembly-room when they knew that it was his 
turn to pray. But though there was in these effu- 
sions a great coruscation of eloquent dissertation, 
there was no sense of spiritual need. They were 
sincere so far as they went ; but they were the in- 
tellectual efforts of a Deist, and they had nothing 
in them of the humble supplications of a sinner, 
or of the lofty communion of a saint. 

After passing through his theological curriculum 
he was licensed to preach the Gospel on the 31st of 
July, 1799, while he was yet but nineteen years of 
age. The law of the Church at that time required 
that a licentiate should be twenty-one years old, but 
it was set aside in his case on the ground that " he 
was a lad of pregnant parts;" and he virtually ob- 
served the law, after all, for though thus early ap- 
proved by his Presbytery, he does not seem to have 
been in any haste to preach. He spent two sessions, 
after license, at the University of Edinburgh in the 
study of mathematics and chemistry, and it was not 
until the 2d of November, 1802, that he was advanced 
to the pastorate of the parish of Kilmany. Before 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 197 

that date he had been for a few months assistant to 
the minister of Cavers, but he did not reside in the 
parish, and satisfied his conscience with a weekly visit 
for the purpose of preaching the sermon that was 
required of him. Nor were things much better af- 
ter his ordination. His ambition at that time was 
entirely academical. He had set his heart on be- 
coming Professor of Mathematics in the University 
of St. Andrews, and during the first year of his 
ministry he officiated as assistant professor, doing 
all the work of the chair, and then repairing to Kil- 
many on the Saturday to go through the round of 
Sabbath duty, after which he returned to St. An- 
drews on the Monday morning. The second year 
the mathematical professor dispensed with his ser- 
vices — Chalmers thought from jealousy — and there- 
fore he set up for himself as an extra-mural 
lecturer. But though he keenly felt what he be- 
lieved to be a personal slight in the matter of the 
professorship, his conscience was no way sensitive, 
as yet, concerning the demands of the pastorate. 
He believed that after the satisfactory discharge of 
his parish duties he might have five days of the 
week uninterrupted for the prosecution of any sci- 
entific work to which his taste might incline him. 



198 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

In short, he looked upon his ministerial labors as 
lighter things, to which he might devote the lei- 
sure which he could command from more important 
pursuits. 

But a wonderful revolution from all this was soon 
to be effected. A speech delivered by him in the 
General Assembly of 1809, on the subject of the 
augmentation of the stipends of the clergy, attract- 
ed general attention for its ability, its humor, its 
" canniness," and its indications of genius and pow- 
er, so that Andrew Thomson asked him to write for 
the Christian Instructor, and Brewster requested 
him to contribute to the Edinburgk^Ihcyclopcedia. 
For the latter of these publications lie undertook to 
write the article " Christianity," and the preparation 
of that dissertation, following close upon a series of 
severe bereavements and a long and serious illness, 
in the course of which he had become deeply im- 
pressed with the importance of spiritual concerns, 
led to a change in his religious sentiments which, 
after his perusal of Wilberf orce's " Practical Yiew 
of Christianity," resulted in his conversion to Christ. 

From that moment his whole character and work 
were transfigured and glorified. He laid himself 
upon the altar, and the altar not only sanctified but 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 199 

energized and ennobled the gift. Formerly the Bi- 
ble was scarcely ever in his hand, now it was the 
theme of his constant and delighted study. No 
longer now did he regard the work of the ministry 
as a sort of extra to which he might turn as a relax- 
ation in the interludes, of more important labors, 
but it became the one great, absorbing enterprise of 
his life. And whereas before he had restricted him- 
self to the enforcement of the precepts of morality, 
and had assured his people " that all the deficiencies 
of their imperfect virtue would be supplied by the 
atonement and propitiation of Christ," he was now 
convinced that "in the system of 'Do this and live' 
no peace, and even no true and worthy obedience 
can ever be attained ;" it is " Believe in the Lord 
Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved." 

The result was that now the great feature of his 
sermons was the earnestness with which he held 
forth Christ and his salvation as God's free gift, 
which it was the sinner's privilege and duty at once 
and most gratefully to accept. Nay, not satisfied 
with doing that in the body of his discourse, he 
would often, after the concluding devotional exer- 
cises, and before the benediction, break out anew 
into entreaty, as if unwilling to let any one go until 



200 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

he had laid hold of Jesus Christ as freely offered 
to him in the Gospel. Those who have recovered 
from a long illness know how new and fresh every- 
thing looked to them when they first went out to 
gaze upon the face of nature. Now, after his con- 
version, something like that in the case of the Scrip- 
tures and that gospel which is the main burden of 
their testimony, was experienced by Chalmers, and 
that fresh newness he caught and preserved in the 
sermons which he wrote at that time, and which 
were afterwards given, just as they were originally 
written, to rapt and awe -struck hearers in Glas- 
gow and Edinburgh. He devoted himself wholly 
to this work, and very soon the profiting appeared 
unto all men. For not only did the church become 
crowded with hearers drawn from all the parishes 
around, but conversions were frequent, and that 
which he did not succeed in accomplishing by mere 
ethical teaching was wrought by the spirit of God 
through his uplifting of the cross of Christ before 
his hearers. 

This was " a crucial instance." If any man could 
have succeeded in the improvement of his fellows 
by the simple enforcement of morality it was Chal- 
mers ; for he was great on all sides of his nature, 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 201 

and had, besides, that subtle, indescribable thing 
which we call genius, and which makes everything 
magnetic which it touches. But even in his case 
the effort was a failure ; while, on the other hand, 
so soon as he began to proclaim the Gospel as Paul 
preached it, he found it to be " the power of God 
unto salvation unto every one that believeth." 
Here is his own testimony in his parting address to 
the inhabitants of Kilmany, which I quote not only 
as a specimen of his well-known style, but because 
it has fallen a little out of sight in these last days, 
and we need to be anew reminded of the truth 
which it emphasizes. The passage is somewhat 
long, but its importance will justify me in giving it 
in full : 

"And here I cannot but record the effect of an 
actual though undesigned experiment which I pros- 
ecuted for upward of twelve years among you. 
For the greater part of that time I could expatiate 
on the meanness of dishonesty, on the villany of 
falsehood, on the despicable arts of calumny; in a 
word, upon all those deformities of character which 
awaken the natural indignation of the human heart 
against the pests and the disturbers of human soci- 
ety. Now, could I, upon the strength of these warm 
9* 



202 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

expostulations, have got the thief to give up his 
stealing, and the evil speaker his censoriousness, and 
the liar his deviations from truth, I should have felt 
all the repose of one who had gotten his ultimate 
object. It never occurred to me that all this might 
have been done, and yet the soul of every hearer 
have remained in full alienation from God; and 
that even could I have established in the bosom of 
one who stole such a principle of abhorrence at the 
meanness of dishonesty that he was prevailed upon 
to steal no more, he might still have retained a 
heart as completely unturned to God, and as totally 
unpossessed by a principle of love to Him as before. 
In a word, though I might have made him a more 
upright and honorable man, I might have left him 
as destitute of the essence of religious principle as 
ever. But the interesting fact is that during the 
whole of that period, in which I made no attempt 
against the natural enmity of the mind to God ; 
while I was inattentive to the way in which this 
enmity is dissolved, even by the free offer on the 
one hand, and the believing acceptance on the oth- 
er, of the Gospel salvation ; while Christ, through 
whose blood the sinner who by nature stands afar 
off is brought near to the heavenly Law-giver whom 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 203 

he lias offended, was scarcely ever spoken of, or 
spoken of in such a way as stripped Him of all the 
importance of His character and His offices, even at 
this time I certainly did press the reformations of 
honor and truth and integrity among my people, 
but / never once heard of any such reformations 
having been effected among them. If there was 
anything at all brought about in this way, it ivas 
more than ever I got any account of I am not sen- 
sible that all the vehemence with which I urged the 
virtues and the proprieties of social life had the 
weight of a feather on the moral habits of my pa- 
rishioners. And it was not till I got impressed by 
the utter alienation of the heart in all its desires 
and affections from God ; it was not till reconcilia- 
tion to him became the distinct and the prominent 
object of my ministerial exertions ; it was not till I 
took the Scriptural way of laying the method of 
reconciliation before them ; it was not till the free 
offer of forgiveness through the blood of Christ was 
urged upon their acceptance, and the Holy Spirit 
given through the channel of Christ's mediatorship 
to all who ask him was set before them, as the unceas- 
ing object of their dependence and their prayers ; 
in one word, it was not till the contemplations of 



204 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

my people were turned to these great and essential 
elements in the business of a soul providing for its 
interests with God, and the concerns of its eternity, 
that I ever heard of any of those subordinate refor- 
mations which I aforetime made the earnest and the 
zealous, but I am afraid, at the same time, the ulti- 
mate object of my earlier ministrations. Ye serv- 
ants whose scrupulous fidelity has now attracted 
the notice of, and drawn forth in my hearing a de- 
lightful testimony from your masters, what mischief 
you would have done had your zeal for doctrines 
and sacraments been accompanied by the sloth and 
the remissness, and what in the prevailing tone of 
moral relaxation is accounted the allowable purloin- 
ing, of your earlier days ! But a sense of your 
heavenly Master's eye has brought another influ- 
ence to bear upon you, and while you are thus striv- 
ing to adorn the doctrine of God your Saviour in 
all things, you may, poor as you are, reclaim the 
great ones of the land to the acknowledgment of 
the faith. You have at least taught me that to 
preach Christ is the only effective way of preaching 
morality in all its branches, and out of your humble 
cottages have I gathered a lesson which I pray God 
I may be enabled to carry with all its simplicity 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 205 

into a wider theatre, and to bring with all the pow- 
er of its subduing efficacy upon the vices of a more 
crowded population."* 

" What shall the man do that cometh after the 
king ?" You can never repeat Chalmers's exper- 
iment under more favorable circumstances, and 
w r hy should you try to go again through that part 
of it which on his own showing was an absolute 
failure? Take his word for it. This is the con- 
clusion of the whole matter, " To preach Christ is 
the only effective way of preaching morality in all 
its branches;" and when you enter on your minis- 
try, begin it on that principle. Leave all philoso- 
phizings, and speculations, and reasonings about 
science, falsely so called, and preach Christ. The 
theme is old, but the new man makes everything 
new; and that old theme, enforced by a new man 
who has passed through an experience like that of 
Chalmers, will be as fresh as the most advanced 
thought of the age with which multitudes are so 
enamored. A few years ago there was a consider- 
able outcry for a revival of ethical teaching in the 
pulpit, because of the occurrence of repeated in- 

* "Memoir of the Life and Writings of Thomas Chalmers, 
D.D.," vol. i., pp. 434-436. Rev. William Hanna, LL.D. 



206 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

stances of defalcation and defection among those 
connected with Christian churches. But that was 
not what was needed. The doctors were all agreed 
that these violations of trust were a symptom of 
something ; but as to what that something w r as they 
differed. In the light of this experience of Chal- 
mers, however, those were right who affirmed that 
their dishonesties were an indication not of too lit- 
tle preaching of ethics, but of too little preaching 
of Christ, and I rejoiced in the brave and ringing 
words on that aspect of the case which came from 
the beloved and honored brother who then sat in 
the homiletic chair of this seminary.* May I en- 
treat you to bear this test case of Chalmers's contin- 
ually in mind, and never to allow yourselves to be 
diverted by any influence whatever from the insist- 
ence upon those great central truths which revolve 
around the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. 

From Kilmany Chalmers was called to Glasgow, 
where, on the 21st of July, 1815, he was installed as 
pastor of the Tron Church, and whence in August, 
1.819, he was transferred, in the same city, to the 
new parish of St. John's, which was virtually cre- 

* The Rev. Professor Hoppin, in The New Englander. 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 207 

ated for him. In the former of these he did in his 
own way a work very similar to that which was ac- 
complished at the same time by Thomson in Edin- 
burgh. He brought back the cultured and refined 
into the allegiance of the Cross without alienating 
the common people. His discourses were, in their 
leading thoughts, intellectual and abstract, and so 
fitter for the educated than the uneducated; but 
the Christian experience with which they w T ere per- 
vaded, the vivid imagination by which they were 
occasionally illuminated, and the whirlwind of ear- 
nestness with which they were delivered, carried 
the most untutored in his audience with him as if 
by storm; and the stories w 7 hich are told of their 
effects would seem almost incredible but for the 
character of the witnesses who agree in their attes- 
tation of them. 

It was at this time that he delivered his famous 
Astronomical Discourses, which, whatever may be 
said either of the objection which he sought to meet, 
or of the argument by which he met it, must be 
pronounced unrivalled for the grandeur and ampli- 
tude of their sweep through the depths of space, 
and for what John Foster called "the brilliant glow 
of a blazing eloquence" with which they displayed 



208 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

the sublime poetry of the heavens. They were first 
preached on Thursday afternoons, and they drew 
merchants from their places of business at the most 
important hour of the day in such numbers that 
there was often no standing room to be obtained 
within the church. Dr. Wardlaw has given the fol- 
lowing description of the scene : " Suppose the 
congregation assembled — -pews filled with sitters, 
and aisles to a great extent with standers. They wait 
in eager expectation. The preacher appears. The 
devotional exercises of praise and prayer having 
been gone through with unaffected simplicity and 
earnestness, the entire assembly set themselves for 
the treat, with feelings very diverse in kind, but all 
eager and intent. There is a hush of dead silence. 
The text is announced, and he begins. Every coun- 
tenance is up, every e} 7 e bent with fixed intentness 
on the speaker. As he kindles, the interest grows. 
Every breath is held, every cough is suppressed, 
every fidgety movement is settled ; every one, riv- 
eted himself by the spell of the impassioned and 
entrancing eloquence, knows how sensitively his 
neighbor will resent the very slightest disturbance. 
Then, by-and-by, there is a pause. The speaker 
stops to gather breath, to wipe his forehead, to ad- 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 209 

just his gown, and purposely too, and wisely, to give 
frhe audience as well as himself a moment or two of 
relaxation. The moment is embraced; there is a 
free breathing, suppressed coughs get vent, postures 
are changed, there is a universal stir, as of persons 
who could not have endured tliQ constraint much 
longer. The preacher bends forward, his hand is 
raised, all is again hushed. The same stillness and 
strain of unrelaxed attention is repeated, more in- 
tent still, it may be, than before, as the interest of 
the subject and the speaker advance. And so for 
perhaps four or five times in the course of a ser- 
mon there is the relaxation and the 'at it again,' 
till the final winding up." * 

To many, no doubt, he was in all this only like one 
" who had a pleasant voice, and could play well on 
an instrument," but Dr.Wardlaw adds that there was 
abundant proof " that in the highest sense his labor 
was not in vain in the Lord, and that the truths 
which with so much fearless fidelity and j impas- 
sioned earnestness he delivered went in many in- 
stances farther than the ear or the intellect; that 



* " Memoir of the Life and Writings of Thomas Chalmers, 
D.D.," ubi supra, vol. ii., p. 158. 



210 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

they reached the heart, and by the power of the 
Spirit of God turned it to God." 

In St. John's Church he inaugurated and super- 
intended what was perhaps the greatest and most 
effective parochial organization which the Christian 
Church has ever seen in operation. His idea was 
that the poor of the parish, that is, all the poor resi- 
dent within its boundaries, should be supported, not 
by local rates, but by the voluntary contributions 
of the inhabitants as they entered the church ; and 
though the population numbered more than ten 
thousand, and most of them were weavers, laborers, 
and factory workers, he yet succeeded for three 
years not only in supplying the wants of the poor, 
but also in erecting and supporting most excellent 
schools; and, indeed, after he had left the parish, 
and so long as the machinery which he originated 
remained in operation, the results were such as to 
astonish all beholders. His church was a perfect 
bee -hive, without any drones — the realization of 
John Wesley's ideal, " at work, all at work, and al- 
ways at work ;" and busiest of all was the pastor 
himself, so that an assistant was engaged to relieve 
him of some of his onerous duties. 

This assistant was the famous Edward Irving, 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 211 

whose name has once more come into prominence 
through the recent publication of the Carlyle Rem- 
iniscences, Letters, and Memoirs, and whose reputa- 
tion is the only one, in my judgment, that comes un- 
sullied out of the mess which these revelations have 
made. Indeed there are few passages in modern lit- 
erature more touching than that which describes him 
sitting by his friend on the lone Scottish moor, and 
coming to the sad discovery that his companion had 
drifted away from his faith in Christianity as a su- 
pernatural revelation. Willingly would I linger a lit- 
tle over that gifted son of genius, not unworthy in 
many respects to stand by the side of Chalmers, and 
whose juxtaposition to him here serves to bring out 
so marked a contrast, and to point so significant a 
warning. Chalmers, with all his soaring imagina- 
tion, always walked in the practical, but Irving was 
visionary and romantic, to the entire neglect of the 
practical and practicable. His mental as well as his 
physical vision was oblique, and he was always apt 
to fly off at some tangent of truth, because he was 
not centripetally balanced. When he went to Lon- 
don to bes;in his work there he said, " There are a 
few things which bind me to the world, and but 
very few; one is to make a demonstration for a 



212 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

higher style of Christianity, something more mag- 
nanimous than this age affects, God knoweth with 
what success." And for a time, despite some ec- 
centricities and mistakes, he was a great power in 
the metropolis on the side of truth and righteous- 
ness, gathering round him multitudes of men of 
highest culture and influence in that great city. 
But, by -and -by, he became connected with the 
Albany Conference, and devoted himself almost 
exclusively to prophetic studies, becoming editor 
of the Morning Watch, and taking a foremost place 
among those who gave themselves to the map- 
ping out of " times and seasons." From that hour 
his influence began to wane. Then came the sad 
scenes of the Tongues, then the organization of the 
Catholic Apostolic Church, and then his death, as of 
one burned up with some inner volcanic fire. Thus 
an influence which might have been lasting for 
good went out in the origination of a new denomi- 
nation which has attempted to combine the symbol- 
ism of the Old Testament w T ith the doctrine of the 
New, but has had little or no effect upon the solu- 
tion of the great questions or the guidance of the 
great movements of the age. The contrast between 
that denomination, which is the outcome of Irving's 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 213 

work, and the Free Church of Scotland, which is 
the outcome of the work of Chalmers, is suggestive 
of many things, but of none to you more useful 
than of the danger of losing sight of the duty of 
the present in the exclusive study of the future. 
Had Irving set himself with anything like the 
devotion of Chalmers to the " excavation " of the 
heathen in some district of London, instead of curi- 
ously prying into the unfulfilled prophecies of the 
future, there might have been no tongues, but 
there would have been more good effected, and the 
Church might not have had to mourn over the aber- 
ration of one of her noblest sons. It is the aggres- 
siveness of the Church that is to keep it orthodox, 
and whenever schemes of prophetic fulfilment, or 
indeed speculations of any sort, take the place of 
efforts for the evangelization of the unconverted, 
we may look out for the uprising of some form of 
Irvingism. 

But I must return to Chalmers. The continuous 
strain and excitement of his work at St. John's be- 
gan to tell upon his strength, and that moved him, 
much to the regret of all the citizens of Glasgow, 
to accept the chair of Moral Philosophy in the Uni- 
versity of St. Andrews, where he spent the years 



214 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

from 1823 till 1828, and whence, at the latter date, he 
was transferred to the Professorship of Theology in 
Edinburgh, an office which he held till the disrup- 
tion of the Church in 1843, 

This is not the place to enter upon a discussion 
of what came afterwards to be known as " The Ten 
Years' Conflict " between the courts of the Church 
and the civil courts of the land, which issued in the 
formation of the Free Church. Let it suffice for 
me to state that Chalmers had entered most hearti- 
ly into the prosecution of an effort for church ex- 
tension whereby two hundred new churches had 
been erected in destitute localities; and now out of 
the struggle which he and his coadjutors maintained 
there came a yet larger measure of church exten- 
sion, though not precisely in the way that he first 
anticipated. The effort to secure the spiritual in- 
dependence of the Church was, especially in its later 
stages, fully more a religious revival than a politi- 
cal conflict; and it was because he valued the spirit- 
ual as the end to the attainment of which the es- 
tablishment was regarded by him as only a means, 
that he became so willing at length to sever the 
connection which bound him to the State. So late 
as the spring of 1838 he had delivered in London, 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 215 

amid great eclat, and with the countenance of bish- 
ops and statesmen, a course of lectures in defence 
of the establishment of the Church by the State, 
and many have accused him of inconsistency in se- 
ceding only five years later from the State Church 
himself; but there was in reality no change in his 
way of looking at the subject. At a later date he 
said, "Who cares about the Free Church compared 
with the Christian good of the people of Scotland ? 
Who cares about any Church but as an instru- 
ment of Christian good ?" * and these were his senti- 
ments all through. He valued the establishment of a 
Church by the State only as a means of securing the 
spiritual welfare of the people; and when he found 
that he was baffled in his efforts to get at the peo- 
ple for their good by an interference from the civil 
courts, which was declared to be an inevitable con- 
sequence of the establishment of the Church by the 
State, then, w T ith characteristic earnestness and de- 
cision, and .with perfect consistency, he severed his 
connection with the State Church, that he might 
thereby the better accomplish the great spiritual 
end which he had in view. Personally I believe 

* "Memoir of the Life and Writings of Thomas Chalmers, 
D.D. ," p. 168. Norman L. Walker. 



216 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

that the connection of a church with the State is 
always and everywhere pernicious, and I have no 
sympathy with the arguments of Chalmers's famous 
lectures on the subject, but that does not prevent 
me from doing justice to his position, or from per- 
ceiving his thorough consistency with himself in the 
course which he adopted. 

At the Disruption Chalmers became Professor of 
Theology to the Free Church, and to the end of his 
days he had around him a circle of loving and de- 
voted students, all of whom were fired with enthu- 
siasm which they had caught from his lips. Indeed 
that, next to his thorough grasp and clear exposition 
of the great doctrines of experimental theology, 
was his special forte as a teacher. He did not deal 
in learned disquisitions or subtle discussions. He 
was not so much an instructor as a quickener. The 
other professors laid the materials in the minds of 
the students, but he brought and struck the match 
which kindled these materials into a flame that 
burned with an energy kindred to his own. Each 
of them went forth not only with an ardent affec- 
tion for his teacher in his heart, but also eager to 
follow him in his great work for the Christian wel- 
fare of the people of Scotland — nor of Scotland 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 217 

only, but of the world ; for at St. Andrews Duff was 
fired with missionary zeal under his influence, and 
in Edinburgh some of the greatest of our modern 
ministers and missionaries were stirred into conse- 
crated enthusiasm by his fervid utterances. 

But his most interesting enterprise was yet to 
come. Still yearning to get " the common people " 
into the Church, he set about the "excavation," af- 
ter his own territorial plan, of that district of Edin- 
burgh in which the West Port was situated. That 
was the name of a narrow alley running into the 
Grassmarket, and it had come into notoriety in the 
early part of the century as the place in which was 
the house where Burke and Hare perpetrated those 
diabolical murders which gave a new verb — to burke 
— to the English language. The plan of Chalmers 
was to select a district of manageable compass, to 
cover it with volunteer workers from the churches, 
to have it thoroughly explored, and to have every 
individual in it personally invited to come to 
hear the preaching of the Gospel in a church close 
at hand. He found a tanner's loft, which he 
rented for a hall, and there himself commenced 
preaching operations. The issue was the building 

of a church, the setting of a pastor over it, and the 
10 



218 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

gathering in of numbers of the most depraved and 
outcast of the population. Nor that alone, for now 
the example has been followed in many of the 
largest cities of Great Britain, and wherever the ex- 
periment has been wisely and perseveringly carried 
out, it has been attended with success. Dr. Chal- 
mers never seems to me so great as when I think of 
him standing in that tanner's hall preaching to the 
people who came thither in their common attire to 
hear the Gospel from his lips. And I can under- 
stand the gusto with which he used to tell how one 
of his visitors, on entering into the room of a poor 
woman, and asking if she ever went to church, re- 
ceived for answer, " Yes." Where ? " Oh just to 
the tannery hall ower by — ane Chalmers preaches 
— I like to encourage him, puir body !" 

Only a month before his death the first commun- 
ion was observed in the new building, which had by 
that time been erected, and the following extract 
from a letter to Mr. Lennox, of New York, will bet- 
ter show the heart of the man on this subject than 
any words of mine: "I wish to commemorate what 
to me is the most joyful event of my life. I have 
been intent for thirty years on the completion of a 
territorial experiment, and I have now to bless God 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 219 

for the consummation of it. Our church was opened 
on the 19th of February, and in one month my anx- 
ieties respecting an attendance have been set at rest. 
Five-sixths of the sittings have been let ; but the 
best part of it is that three-fourths of these are from 
the West Port, a locality which two years ago had 
not one in ten church-goers from the whole popula- 
tion. I presided myself on Sabbath last over its 
first sacrament. There were one hundred and thirty- 
two communicants, and one hundred of them from 
the West Port." * On the day after that first com- 
munion he wrote to Mr. Tasker, the West Port 
pastor, "I have got now the desire of my heart — 
the church is finished, the schools are flourishing, 
our ecclesiastical machinery is about complete, and 
all in good working order. God has, indeed, heard 
my prayer, and I could now lay down my head in 
peace and die." 

And indeed the end was near. In the month 
of May following he had been up in London giving 
testimony before a committee of the House of Com- 
mons, and had returned to his home, when, on the 
morning of the 31st, the day on which he was ex- 

* Hanna's "Memoir of Life and Writings of Chalmers," 
vol. iv.,p. 404. 



220 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

pected to give before the Assembly the report of 
the College Committee, it was announced that he 
had died during the night, apparently in his sleep, 
and without so much of a struggle as to disarrange 
in the least the drapery of his couch. 

" Servant of God, well done ! 
Rest from thy loved employ ; 
The battle fought, the victory won, 
Enter thy Master's joy. 

"The voice at midnight came; 
He started up to hear; 
A mortal arrow pierced his frame, 
He fell, but felt no fear. 

" Tranquil amidst alarms, 
It found him in the field, 
A veteran slumbering on his arms 
Beneath his red-cross shield. 

" His sword was in his hand, 
Still warm with recent fight, 
Ready that moment at command 
Through rock and steel to smite. 

" His spirit with a bound 

Burst its encumbering clay; 
His tent at sunrise on the ground 
A darkened ruin lay." 

There was in the mind of Chalmers a wonderful 
equipoise of opposites. With great mathematical 
ability there was combined keen metaphysical acu- 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 221 

men, so that he was both a man of science and a 
mental philosopher. He was at home in political 
economj^ but his. hearty sympathies with his fel- 
low - men, not to speak of his Christian love for 
all men, kept it in him from being the "Dismal 
Science " which it was to Thomas Carlyle. Grasp- 
ing the greatest principles, he was at the same time 
alive to the importance of the minutest details. 
With the glowing imagination of the poet, he had 
all the practical sagacity of the wisest of his coun- 
trymen. And with the unwavering confidence of 
a great man, he had the simplicity — I had almost 
said the unconsciousness — of a little child. These 
qualities, so finely balanced, were all sublimed by 
genius, and heated to a constant incandescence by 
the consecrating influence of the Holy Spirit. 

In person he was stout and almost stocky. His 
countenance when in repose was mild, his eye wa- 
tery, almost dull, with a far-off look in it, as if he 
were gazing on things invisible to others, but when 
he became excited it lighted up as if with celes- 
tial fire, and shone with the lustre of genius. His 
speech bewrayed him everywhere. It was not mere- 
ly Scottish, but it was roughly provincial, and with- 
al he read his discourses closely. Yet over all these 



222 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

disadvantages the force of the orator triumphed so 
that even the cool, critical Jeffrey said of his elo- 
quence that "it reminded him more of what one 
reads of as the effect of the eloquence of Demosthe- 
nes than anything he ever saw ;" and again, that " he 
could not believe more had ever been done by the 
oratory of Demosthenes, Cicero, Burke, or Sheri- 
dan." To me it seems as if the force of his speech 
were due not merely to the qualities which I have 
enumerated, but also to two characteristics which 
he possessed in an almost unparalleled degree, and 
which enabled him to make use of all these others 
in any circumstances and at all times. The first of 
these was his power of abstraction. No matter 
where he was, he could withdraw himself from sur- 
rounding occurrences, and apply himself to the mat- 
ter which he had in hand. Some of the sermons 
which, according to the critics, smelled so much of 
the lamp were written by snatches on his journey- 
ings, in inns, and in the houses of his friends. It 
seemed as if at will he could withdraw into an in- 
ner chamber of his soul, where he could defy all in- 
terruption, and follow out the theme on which he 
was engaged. Then, akin to that abstraction, and 
along with it, he had the power of concentration. 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 223 

Whatever he was prosecuting, he was for the time 
" totus in illo." His motto always might have been 
" this one thing I do." Whatever he took up with 
he could separate from all other things, and he could 
concentrate himself upon it. If it were mathemat- 
ics, he was for the time exclusively devoted to that; 
if it were church extension, he gave himself wholly 
to that; if it were territorial missions, he saw noth- 
ing but them ; and so, being the man he otherwise 
was, he achieved great things in every department 
upon w T hieh he entered. 

But it was in his sermons that the qualities of 
which I have spoken wrought the most remarkable 
results, for he saw only one thing in his text, and 
he devoted his discourse entirely to the enforce- 
ment of that. Robert Hall complained of him that 
he made no progress as he went on, but that he 
kept continually reproducing the same truth, only 
with added intensity of utterance and exuberance 
of illustration. But that was owing to the nature 
of the man. Other preachers seek to make differ- 
ent impressions in different portions of their ser- 
mons, Chalmers was content to make no more than 
one by the whole sermon ; but when he had made 
that, it was indelible. No man who ever heard him 



224 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

could help seeing what he would be at, or could ever 
forget the importance which he gave it. His itera- 
tions and reiterations and re-reiterations were but 
like the whirlings of the sling from which at length 
the stone was sent whizzing to its mark ; or like the 
gyrations of the eagle as it circles round and round 
in order only the more unerringly to swoop down 
upon its prey. His style was not meant for the 
eye, and so one soon tires of reading him ; but for 
the ear it was most effective; and wherever, to this 
day, you meet with one who was privileged to listen 
to him from the pulpit, you will be sure to find him 
repeating to you the essence of the sermon which 
the great orator had distilled into a phrase that 
could not be misunderstood, and that w T ould not 
allow itself to be forgotten. 

Andrew Fuller visited him shortly after his con- 
version, and subsequently wrote thus to him : "After 
parting with you, I was struck with the importance 
which may attach to a single mind receiving an 
evangelical impression ;" and the life whose course 
I have so imperfectly traced is an admirable illus- 
tration of the sagacity of that remark as applied to 
Chalmers. But when the same eminent divine, be- 
wailing what he regarded as Chalmers's slavery to 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 225 

the manuscript, said, " If that man would but throw- 
away his papers in the pulpit, he might be king of 
Scotland," he was not quite so accurate, for Chal- 
mers kept his papers, and yet became the King of 
Scotland. But, as the old Scotch woman said, " It 
was fell readin' thon," and the earnestness of the 
man went through his " papers " into the souls of his 
hearers. Every man must do in that matter what 
he can do best, and it is not the mere presence of 
the papers, but what is on them, and what is behind 
them, that must determine whether they shall be a 
help or a hinderance. 

It has been a life-long regret to me that, though 
I was eighteen years of age when Chalmers died, I 
never had the privilege of looking on his face, so 
leonine and yet so loving, or listening to his voice. 
I cannot, therefore, describe him to you as from per- 
sonal observation ; but as the best of many delinea- 
tions of his appearance and eloquence in the pulpit 
which I have seen, I ask your indulgence while I 
read to you that of John Brown, M.D., the delight- 
ful author of "Rab and his Friends." It is taken 
from the second volume of his " Horse SubsecivaG :" 

" We remember well our first hearing Dr. Chal- 
mers. We were in a moorland district in Tweed- 
10* 



226 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

dale, rejoicing in the country after nine months 
of the High -school. We heard that the famous 
preacher was to be at a neighboring parish church, 
and off we set, a cartful of irrepressible youngsters. 
c Calm was all nature as a resting wheel.' The 
crows, instead of making wing, were impudent and 
still ; the cart-horses, without knowing why, were 
standing, knowing the day, at the field gates, gos- 
sipping and gazing, idle and happy ; the moor was 
stretching away in the pale sunlight — vast, dim, 
melancholy, like a sea ; everywhere were to be seen 
the gathering people, 'sprinklings of blythe com- 
pany;' the country-side seemed moved to one cen- 
tre. As we entered the kirk we saw a notorious 
character, a drover, who had much of the brutal 
look of what he worked in, with the knowing eye 
of a man of the city — a sort of big Peter Bell. 

" ' He had a hardness in his eye, 
He had a hardness in his cheek.' 

He was our terror, and we not only wondered but 
were afraid when we saw him going in. The kirk 
was as full as it could hold. How different it looks 
to a brisk town congregation ! There was a fine 
leisureliness and vague stare; all the dignity and 
vacancy of animals; eyebrows raised and mouths 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 227 

open, as is the habit with those who speak little and 
look much, and at far -off objects. The minister 
comes in, homely in his dress and gait, but having 
a great look about him, 'like a mountain among 
hills.' The High-school boys thought him like ' a 
big one of ourselves.' He looks vaguely round 
upon his audience, as if he saw in it one great ob- 
ject, not many. We shall never forget his smile — 
its general benignity ; how he let the light of his 
countenance fall on us! He read a few verses 
quietly; then prayed briefly, solemnly, with his 
eyes wide open all the time, but not seeing. Then 
he gave out his text ; we forget it, but its subject 
was, 'Death reigns.' He stated slowty, calmly, the 
simple meaning of the words: what death was, 
and how and why it reigned ; then suddenly he 
started and looked like a man who had seen some 
great sight, and was breathless to declare it. He 
told us how death reigned — everywhere, at all 
times, in all places ; how we all knew it, how we 
would yet know more of it. The drover, who had 
sat down in the table-seat [square pew] opposite, 
was gazing up in a state of stupid excitement ; he 
seemed restless, but never kept his eye from the 
speaker. The tide set in ; everything added to its 



228 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

power ; deep called to deep, imagery and illustra- 
tion poured in, and every now and then the theme 
— the simple, terrible statement — was repeated in 
some lucid interval. After overwhelming us with 
proofs of the reign of death, and transferring to us 
his intense urgency and emotion, and after shriek- 
ing, as if in despair, these words, 'Death is a tre- 
mendous necessity P he suddenly looked beyond, 
as if into some distant region, and cried out, 'Be- 
hold ! a mightier ! Who is this ? He cometh from 
Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah, glorious 
in his apparel, speaking in righteousness, travelling 
in the greatness of his strength, mighty to save.' 
Then in a few plain sentences he stated the truth 
as to sin entering, and death by sin, and death pass- 
ing upon all. Then he took fire once more, and en- 
forced with redoubled energy and richness the free- 
ness, the simplicity, the security, the sufficiency of 
the great method of justification. How astonished 
and impressed we all were! He was at the full 
thunder of his power; the whole man was in an 
agony of earnestness. The drover was weeping like 
a child, the tears running down his ruddy, coarse 
cheeks, his face opened out and smoothed like an 
infant's, his whole body stirred with emotion. We 
had all insensibly been drawn out of our seats, 



THOMAS CHALMERS. 229 

and were converging towards the wonderful speak- 
er; and when he sat down, after warning each one 
of us to remember who it was and what it was that 
followed Death on the pale horse, and how alone 
we could escape, we all sunk back into our seats. 
How beautiful to our eyes did the thunderer look ! — 
exhausted, but sweet and pure. How he poured 
out his soul before his God in giving thanks for 
sending the Abolisher of Death ! Then a short 
psalm, and all was ended. 

"We went home quieter than we came. We 
did not recount the foals, with their long legs and 
roguish eyes, and their sedate mothers; we did not 
speculate upon whose dog that was, and whether 
that was a crow or a man in the dim moor. We 
thought of other things — that voice, that face, those 
great, simple, living thoughts, those floods of resist- 
less eloquence, that piercing, shattering voice, that 
1 tremendous necessity.' " 

One knows not whether to admire more the de- 
scription or the thing described ; but one thing is 
clear, the eloquence which inspired that descrip- 
tion, even after the lapse of the years between boy- 
hood and middle life, must have been eloquence 
indeed, combining in itself the force of the torrent 
and the fulness of the sea. 



VII. 

THE PULPITS OF THE DISSENTING CHURCHES. 

For the sake of clearness and continuity, we have 
thus far confined ourselves almost entirely to- the 
pulpit of the Scottish Church as by law established; 
but now, in bringing these sketches to a close, we 
must devote a little attention to the representative 
preachers of the Dissenting denominations. 

Of the smaller bodies, the oldest was that known 
in recent years as the Reformed Presbyterian 
Church. It represented the " Society Men," or 
" Covenanters," who never really joined the Church 
of the Revolution -settlement, because it had not 
insisted on everything that was required in the 
National Covenant and the Solemn League. For 
a considerable time this honorable remnant had no 
ordained ministers, but as the years went on it 
grew in numbers and in strength, though it never 
became large, and finally, about fourteen or fifteen 
years ago, it united, all but a very small minority, 
with the Free Church. But its record was excel- 



THE PULPITS OF THE DISSENTING CHURCHES. 231 

lent, and one at least of its ministers deserves a 
high place among the great preachers of Scotland. 

Dr. William Symington, born at Paisley in 1795, 
and educated at the University of Glasgow and the 
Theological Seminary of the Reformed Presbyte- 
rian Church, was ordained at Stranraer in 1819, and 
transferred to Glasgow in 1838, where he labored 
till his death in 1862. He was a man of magnifi- 
cent presence, fine culture, exquisite taste, great 
strength of mind, and admirable common -sense. 
While faithfully attending to his pastoral work, he 
was a diligent student, and his sermons were all 
carefully prepared. Clear in his style, logical in 
his arrangement, elegant and impressive in his de- 
livery, he drew around him men of intelligence and 
weight of character, and he had an influence far 
beyond the limits of the small denomination of 
which he was an ornament. His works on "The 
Atonement and Intercession of Jesus Christ," on 
" The Mediatorial Dominion of Jesus Christ," and 
on "Messiah the Prince," some of which have been 
reprinted in this country, are still valued by stu- 
dents of systematic theology; and his courses of 
monthly evening lectures on such subjects as the 



232 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

history of Joseph and the Book of Daniel are still 
remembered for their eloquence and power by mul- 
titudes who heard them from his lips. His meth- 
od of preparing these last is thus described by one 
of his sons : " They w r ere the fruit of much careful 
premeditation — not fully written out, much less 
read, but thoroughly studied and digested, the be- 
ginning of each sentence and references to texts 
being put down in neat and orderly form. Not 
read, certainly, for no one understood more thor- 
oughly the true theory of preaching as a concio ad 
populu7n — an address in which the speaker is in 
full electric communication with his hearers. The 
larger writing was reduced to notes on a thin slip. 
These he w T ent over again and again until his mind 
was familiar with the whole process of thought; 
by prayer his soul was brought up to the level of 
the Divine message he was charged to utter, and 
thus were secured the pellucid clearness, the ob- 
vious mastery, the unaffected unction which made 
his preaching so attractive and so useful." * His 
name may not be so familiar to you on this side of 
the Atlantic as those of others in the larger denom- 

* Biographical sketch prefixed to " Messiah the Prince." 1881. 



THE PULPITS OF THE DISSENTING CHURCHES. 233 

inations, but in a day when the pulpits of Glasgow 
were filled by some of the ablest men of their time, 
he was the equal, and in one or two respects per- 
haps the superior, of them all. He was remarkable 
above most for the combination of manliness with 
grace which appeared both in his thinking and in 
his manner; and if he had been in the Established 
Church he would most assuredly have taken a place 
among the foremost leaders on the side of spiritual 
independence. 

Another of these smaller denominations was the 
Original Secession Church. I need not go into the 
history of its formation ; indeed I am not sure that 
I could give it with entire accuracy in every partic- 
ular ; but it was connected with some difference of 
opinion between the members of one branch of the 
Seceders in regard to the principle of a State 
Church. None of them, in practice, were State- 
churchmen, but some of them, in theory, maintain- 
ed that the ideal Church was a State Church, while 
others repudiated State-charchism as altogether and 
everywhere pernicious, and that led to a separation. 
Of this little denomination of theoretical State- 
churchmen, the great man — and he was a great 



234 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

man — was Dr. Thomas McCkie, the famous biog- 
rapher of John Knox. Born at Duns in 1772, edu- 
cated at the University of Edinburgh and the The- 
ological Seminary of the A n ti - Burghers, he was 
ordained at Edinburgh in 1796, and labored in that 
city till his death, in 1835. Though his forte was 
historical investigation, of which his works on the 
Reformation in Italy and Spain, as well as his biog- 
raphies of Knox and Melville, were the rich fruits, 
yet he was no mean preacher. A volume of his 
sermons is preserved in the collected edition of his 
works, and, like the man, they are weighty and 
solid, somewhat heavy in style, but always lumi- 
nous, and invariably Jesus is in the midst. His 
lectures on Esther are among the finest specimens 
of the best sort of practical exposition of the his- 
torical portions of the Scriptures; and together 
with Peddie's Jonah and Dick's lectures on the 
Acts of the Apostles, they may be regarded as 
models for that class of discourses. McCrie had a 
singular charm for Hugh Miller, who in his early 
stone-mason days was a frequent attendant on his 
ministry, and who has left a delightful sketch of 
him in his miscellaneous works. I extract the fol- 
lowing sentences: "We were struck by the great 



THE PULPITS OF THE DISSENTING CHURCHES. 235 

simplicity of his manner and style, and listened 
rather soothed and pleased by his lucid statements 
of important truths, grounded, if we may so ex- 
press ourselves, on a deep substratum of serious 
feeling, than surprised by any marked originality 
of view. By-and-by, however, when the first ob- 
vious principles were laid down, he began to draw 
inferences. Ah ! thought we, as we sat up erect in 
the pew, there now is something we never heard 
before. The discourse, simple and quiet at its com- 
mencement, had assumed a new character. The 
unquestioned but common truths were but the 
foundations of the edifice. . . . There were remarks 
on human nature that from their graphic shrewd- 
ness reminded us of Crabbe, and yet the mode was 
entirely different. There were gleams of fancy 
that, falling for a moment on some of the remoter 
recesses of the subject, lighted them up into sudden 
brightness, and when fully shown the gleam dis- 
appeared. There were strokes of eloquence, con- 
densed at times into a single sentence, that found 
their way direct to the heart, and far conclusions 
attained by a few steps through vistas of thought 
unopened before."* This is high praise coming 

* " Headship of Christ/' p. 97. Hugh Miller. 



236 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

from such a quarter, and the reader of McCrie's 
sermons will have to confess that it is not exag- 
gerated. 

Coming now to the United Secession Church, 
and seeking in it mainly for epoch-marking men, I 
mention first John Bkown, D.D., of Edinburgh. 
There were great and good preachers in both 
branches of the Secession before his day, but their 
style was patterned largely after that of the Ers- 
kines and the Marrow men. Their discourses were 
systematic in form, after a stereotyped method, and, 
unless in exceptional cases, without much beauty of 
style or felicity of illustration, or any pretension to 
exegetical exactness. But in the last of these par- 
ticulars the name of John Brown marks the begin- 
ning of an era not only in his own denomination, 
but in Scotland generally. He was in that country 
very much what Moses Stuart was in New England 
— the regenerator, if not the father, of exact Script- 
ural exegesis, and for that he deserves to be held 
in lasting honor. Born at Whitburn in 1784, and 
educated at the University of Edinburgh and the 
Theological Seminary of the Burghers, he was or- 
dained at Biggar in 1806, and removed to Edin- 



THE PULPITS OF THE DISSENTING CHURCHES. 237 

burgh in 1822, where he continued till his death, in 
1858. He was the third in direct succession of 
what his son has called the "dynasty" of the 
Browns. His grandfather was the famous John 
Brown of Haddington, the author of the " Self-In- 
terpreting Bible," and the venerable man of whom 
David Hume said that he preached as if the Lord 
Jesus Christ were at his elbow. His father was 
John Brown of Whitburn, a simple-hearted man, 
without any striking mental qualities, whose good- 
ness was his greatness, and who was an effective 
preacher as well as an earnest evangelist. His son 
was John Brown, M.D., facile princeps, the most 
delightful essayist of his age. 

The theological instructor of Dr. Brown was Dr. 
George Lawson, of Selkirk, a man of great learning, 
profound sagacity, and catholic spirit, whose lect- 
ures on Ruth, Joseph, Esther, and " The Book of 
Proverbs " are still worthy of study, and whose in- 
fluence as a professor in moulding the ministry of 
his denomination for more than twenty years cannot 
well be overestimated. His students, some of whom 
I met in my earlier days as venerable old men, all 
but worshipped his memory, and the impression pro- 
duced by him on John Brown was seen in many 



238 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

ways, but principally in the ultimate tendency of 
his mind to critical studies, in the desire which he 
evinced to simplify the style of theology and go 
back from human systems to Scripture, in the prom- 
inence given by him to moral teaching as an inte- 
gral part of the Gospel, and in his liberal views as 
to Christian forbearance and the freedom of the 
Church from secular control. 

His gifted son has told us, in that admirable let- 
ter to Dr. Cairns which is the gem of his works, 
how Dr. Brown came, after his great and crushing 
bereavement, to "take up with" Vitringa and oth- 
er German expositors; and the studies thus com- 
menced in Biggar were continued in Edinburgh, 
where for more than twenty years he combined the 
work of a professorship of theology with that of 
the pastorate. Even before he entered on his profes- 
sorship, however, he had instituted for the students 
attending his congregation, and such others as chose 
to be present with them, a weekly class for the study 
of the Greek New Testament— and among these 
early pupils were William Cunningham, afterwards 
principal of the Free Church College, and David 
Brown, the commentator on the first six books of 
the New Testament, in the well-known work by 



THE PULPITS OF THE DISSENTING CHURCHES. 239 

Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown, and quite recently 
the moderator of the Free Church. 

As a preacher Dr. Brown's power lay in the clear 
statement and cogent enforcement of the meaning 
of the Scriptures. His great aim seemed to be to 
bring his hearers face to face with the Word, and 
to make them feel that they had to do with God as 
its author. But to do that he had to make very 
clear what the Scriptures really said, and to discover 
that he brought all the resources at his command to 
bear upon the investigation of the portion which he 
had in hand. His Expository Discourses were per- 
haps a little too learned for the pulpit, and a little 
too popular for the professor's chair — a thing almost 
inevitable from the fact that they had to pay a 
double debt by doing duty in both ; but they were 
always clear, honest, independent, and for the most 
part satisfactory. He never needed any one to in- 
terpret his meaning, and he shrank with his whole 
soul from handling the Word of God deceitfully. 
A very common formula with him was this: "That 
is truth, and very important truth, but it is not the 
truth taught in this passage." He did not interpret 
the Bible so as to make it suit his system, but he 
modified his system so as to harmonize it with the 



240 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

Scriptures; and no matter how many authorities 
might be ranged on either side of a controverted 
interpretation, he would judge for himself, and take 
that which for good and satisfactory reasons com- 
mended itself to his own acceptance. His discourses 
now may seem to be in some degree superseded by 
the labors of later commentators, who are better 
furnished for their work than it was possible for 
him then to be ; but the impulse given to that gen- 
eral forward movement in exegetical theology by 
which he has himself been somewhat superseded, 
came first and mainly from himself, and remember- 
ing my own obligations to him, it is with peculiar 
veneration and affectionate gratitude that I have 
dwelt thus upon his work. When I sat at his feet 
he seemed to me to be one of the finest-looking 
men I had ever seen. His face was beautifully 
chiselled, almost like marble ; his forehead was 
high and bare ; his thin white locks flowed lengthi- 
ly over his ears and collar ; his eye was black and 
piercing like an eagle's ; it seemed as if it were look- 
ing you through ; and his voice was clear and ring- 
ing, sometimes trumpet-like. He read closely, and 
as his writing — very foolishly, as I think — was al- 
most microscopic in its neat minuteness, he had to 



THE PULPITS OF THE DISSENTING CHURCHES. 241 

bend very low over his manuscript. But even with 
all these disadvantages, his reading, as his son has 
said, was " a fine and high art, or rather gift," and 
when he was thoroughly roused the effect was great. 

But exposition was his passion, and it was scarcely 
possible to be a member of his class without catch- 
ing the infection of his enthusiasm. He had little 
of the gift of insight or of the faculty of imagina- 
tion, but he made up largely for the want of these 
by indomitable industry, and it was said that one 
could not live a month under his roof without 
learning to be a student. Later writers have de- 
veloped his principles further than he could carry 
them, but his works will remain a noble monument 
to the industry, no less than to the reverence, with 
which he studied the Word of God. 

The revival of exegetical study inaugurated by 
John Brown was carried a long way forward by 
John Eadie, a minister of the same denomination, 
and for more than thirty years a professor in the 
same theological seminary. Born at Alva in 1810, 
he studied at the University of Glasgow, and was 
ordained to the ministry in that city in 1835. He 
was appointed to the professorship of Biblical Lit- 
erature in 1843, and held both offices until his death, 
11 



242 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

in 1876. It was my privilege to be a member of 
his congregation during my strident life in Glas- 
gow, to attend his classes in the theological semi- 
nary, and, in later days, to know him as a friend 
and counsellor. He was never a " popular" preach- 
er, in the current sense of that phrase. His man- 
ner was not elegant. His utterance was thick, and 
there was in it an occasional " click," like that 
which characterizes certain South African languages. 
There was nothing of. the showy or sensational 
about him. The first time you heard him you were 
struck with the clear, fresh, striking explanation 
which he gave of some passage which had hereto- 
fore been obscure to you, but you were not at all 
attracted by his elocution. You went again, how- 
ever, and this time you saw less that was objection- 
able and heard more that was satisfying, and so it 
went on, week by week, until you could not per- 
suade yourself to go elsewhere. I never heard him 
without having something added to my stock of 
knowledge, or some difficulty removed out of my 
mind, or some new interest given to some particu- 
lar portion of the Word of God. He had the habit 
of reading in the morning service consecutively 
through some book of the Bible, and of comment- 



THE PULPITS OF THE DISSENTING CHURCHES. 243 

ing on the portion read in a brief and simple man- 
ner. I had the privilege of hearing him thus go 
over the larger part of the prophecies of Isaiah, and 
though his comment was thrown into the service as 
a kind of extra, for it was followed after singing 
with a discourse proper, it was so truly a feast of 
fat things that it would have been worth going a 
long way to hear, even if there had been nothing 
more. He had great versatility, and, with the ex- 
ception of mathematics, he intermeddled with all 
knowledge. He read voraciously. His memory 
was so retentive that he forgot nothing, and so 
ready that he could always recall that which he 
wanted. His scholarship was perhaps more exten- 
sive in area than accurate in detail, although even 
in the latter respect he was all the time improving, 
so that at length, without having the advantages, 
earlier and later, of these English dignitaries, he was 
the worthy compeer of Alford and Ellicott, even in 
the departments in which they are acknowledged 
masters. His commentaries differ from most other 
exegetical works in the glow of unction by which 
they are pervaded ; a quality which is, perhaps, to be 
traced to the fact that while he was preparing them 
for the press in the study, he was also, at the same 



244 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

time, engaged in the public exposition of the same 
books in the pulpit. Latterly he did not write his 
discourses fully out, but, like Elihu, he was always 
" full of matter," and seemed to be " refreshed by 
speaking." His industry was prodigious, and by a 
careful disposition of his time he was able to car- 
ry on the work of his pastorate most efficiently, 
even while he was enriching his brethren with his 
learned expositions. He had the advantage of Dr. 
Brown in his familiarity with the German language 
and in the possession of a rich imagination, but he 
lacked the forceful utterance of his venerable col- 
league, and he rarely if ever became impassioned ; 
but along with James Morison, also a pupil of John 
Brown, and whose commentaries on Matthew, Mark, 
and the third chapter of the Epistle to the Romans 
are unsurpassed by any in the English language, he 
helped to keep Scotland abreast of other lands in 
the important department of Scripture exegesis. 

But perhaps, as regards pulpit efficiency, in all the 
comprehensiveness of that phrase, the man who did 
most to modernize and to energize the preaching of 
the Secession Church was David King, whose biog- 
raphy has been recently issued from the press. 
Born at Montrose in 1806, and educated partly at 



THE PULPITS GF THE DISSENTING CHURCHES. 245 

Aberdeen and partly at Edinburgh, he was ordained 
at Dalkeith in 1830, and transferred to Glasgow in 
1833, where he held one of the foremost places 
among its preachers for twenty years. Then came 
a break down in health, from which he never fully 
rallied, for after brief pastorates in London and 
Edinburgh he retired into private life, and died in 
1883. He was an admirable organizer, and made 
his Glasgow church a model in this regard to all 
around. He was intensely public-spirited, and took 
an active part upon the platform in all efforts for 
liberty and benevolence. He managed also to find 
time for scientific investigation, so that he became 
an authority in all questions affecting the relations 
of modern discovery to theology. But the pulpit 
was w T ith him supreme. Every Lord's Day was to 
him a great occasion, and he always endeavored 
to serve God with his best. In the words of an- 
other, " One might say he inaugurated a new era 
in the preaching of the Seceders. Before that it 
had been mainly theological, . . . abounding in well- 
worn phrases and distinctions, earnest, no doubt, but 
as a whole in a somewhat cumbrous, conventional, 
and formal style, scarcely ever losing sight of cer- 
tain safeguards and subtleties. Dr. King, certainly 



246 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

not alone, but in a prominent and powerful way, 
put the breath of modern life and thought through 
this. He had a strong philosophical tendency. He 
was eloquent, imaginative, polished, and classic in 
style, and, beyond all question, intense. He was 
among the first of our preachers of any sort who 
had the modern attraction of shortness." * His dis- 
courses were delivered at first without notes, but 
latterly he used a manuscript, through which, rather 
than from which, he gave his thoughts to the peo- 
ple. His sermons were remarkable for their cli- 
mactic structure, rising from stage to stage, as one 
has beautifully said, "Like a succession of terraces 
in an Alpine road," and at each turning the great 
theme stood forth before you in new freshness and 
interest. Students of all denominations were at- 
tracted to his congregation, and his influence went 
far beyond the limits of his own church, and is felt 
to this hour in the hearts of many who are still 
preaching the Gospel in his native land. 

The preaching of the ministers in the Relief 
branch of the United Presbyterian Church was dif- 

* " Memoir and Sermons of Dr. David King," pp. 45, 46. 



THE PULPITS OF THE DISSENTING CHURCHES. 247 

ferent from that of those in all the other denomi- 
nations. I have failed to find an explanation of the 
fact, but it is certain that it was rhetorical, ornate, 
almost florid, alike in matter and in manner. These 
preachers did not hide the truth by any means. 
They were thoroughly evangelical. They preached 
Christ in all the comprehensiveness of the apostolic 
sense of these words, but they did so in a style 
which sometimes tended to divert attention from 
the subject to the manner. They seem to have 
formed themselves after the great French preachers 
more than any others. They wrote their discourses 
with great care, committed them to memory with 
infinite pains, and practised elocution with great 
success. Such a discipline as that of Bourdaloue, 
described by Bungener in "The Preacher and the 
King," represents the sort of training to which, I 
judge, they must have subjected themselves, and 
the result was seen in the immense popularity at- 
tained by some of them whose names, quite un- 
known on this side of the sea, are now all but for- 
gotten in their own land.* But they were more 

* Thus it is told of a young man, the Rev. Mr. Struthers, of 
South College Street Church, Edinburgh, that during his brief 
ministry there the young " advocates " of the Parliament House 
flocked to his ministrations just to study his elocution. 



248 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

than mere rhetoricians, for they did effective serv- 
ice in the land. They deserve to be held in honor 
not only for their proclamation of the truth as it 
is in Jesus, but also because they were the first in 
Scotland to welcome Christians as such, irrespective 
of denominational differences, to the fellowship of 
the Lord's Supper with them, and because, wher- 
ever there was a wrong to be redressed, or a right 
to be maintained, or an abuse to be condemned, they 
were invariably in the front. 

The man of most mark among them,not because he 
represented them in the rhetorical peculiarity which 
I have just specified, but for his genius and dis- 
tinctive individuality, amounting even to eccentric- 
ity, was Dr. William Anderson. Born at Kilsj'th 
in 1799, and educated at the University of Glasgow, 
he was licensed to preach in 1820, and shortly after 
was called to the pastorate of John Street Church, 
Glasgow, in which he continued till his death, in 
1872. His ordination was delayed for upwards of 
a year because of a controversy which arose be- 
tween him and the Presbyteiy. He had quoted 
Shakespeare in the pulpit (!), and above all, and 
worse than all, he read his sermons ; therefore the 
Presbytery refused to ordain him unless he prom- 



THE PULPITS OF THE DISSENTING CHURCHES. 249 

ised to give up these practices. But although he 
was then only in his twenty-second year, he firmly 
withstood that demand, and after a while the Pres- 
bytery yielded. As a preacher, Anderson was, 
before all other things, evangelical, but he was 
not, therefore, commonplace. His discourses were 
marked by originality of thought, raciness of illus- 
tration, and fervor of appeal. They brought the 
Gospel to bear on the experiences of e very-day life, 
and on the great questions which happened to be at 
the moment before the public mind. He stood al- 
ways at the foot of the cross, but from that centre 
he swept the circumference of active life, and dis- 
cussed the first Reform Bill, the emancipation of 
the slaves, the iniquity of the Corn-laws, the condi- 
tion of the masses, and the controversies between 
capital and labor. Indeed, whatever " the present 
truth" might be, one was very sure to hear some 
ringing and suggestive utterance upon it from the 
John Street pulpit. More than any other man in 
Scotland he vindicated the liberty of the pulpit to 
deal with any subject that concerned the welfare of 
humanity. The cannon mounted on his battery 
was no fixture which could be fired only through 

one embrasure, but, like the turret-gun of an iron- 
11* 



250 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

clad, it could sweep the whole horizon, and could be 
brought to bear on the enemies of truth and liberty 
wherever they were. He was not afraid, either, 
to make use of humor in his sermons. He had 
a quaint way of putting things, which was often 
heightened by his mode of snuff-taking, a habit to 
which he was greatly addicted. After uttering 
some of his cutting sarcasms or pungent reproofs, 
he would bring his finger and thumb, with the 
naughty dust between them, from his vest-pocket, 
and convey it to his nostril with a sniff which could 
express at will either contempt or scorn or triumph, 
so that it was amusing to see how he could turn an 
act in itself disagreeable to excellent oratorical ac- 
count. Two volumes of his sermons have been 
published, and there is not a discourse in either vol- 
ume which is not in some way remarkable; but his 
ablest production — I consider it, indeed, the great- 
est book on the subject in our language — is his 
treatise on Regeneration. It has been republished 
in this country, and is very dear to me because of 
the comfort and guidance which it brought me at 
a critical time in my own history. Possibly I am 
for that reason prone to exaggerate its merits, but I 
very earnestly commend it to your studious perusal. 



THE PULPITS OF THE DISSENTING CHURCHES. 251 

Passing now to the Congregationalists, a word 
ought to be said in honor of David Russell, oi 
Dundee, whose Treatise on Infant Salvation was 
the earliest presentation of what is now the com- 
mon faith on that subject which Scotland produced. 
Its publication almost of itself brought round the 
Christian opinion of the land to its conclusions, 
and broadened out "elect infants" into all children 
dying in infancy. That was a service to theology 
too signal to be quite overlooked. 

But the two men whose names as preachers stand 
highest among Scottish Congregationalists were* 
Ralph Wardlaw and William Lindsay Alex- 
ander. Wardlaw was born at Dalkeith in 1779, 
was educated at the University of Glasgow and at 
the Theological Seminary of the Burgher denom- 
ination, then under the charge of Dr. Lawson, of 
Selkirk; but becoming convinced of the scriptural- 
ness of Congregational independency, he publicly 
identified himself at the end of his theological 
course with the Congregational body, and was ulti- 
mately ordained over the newly formed North Al- 
bion Street church, Glasgow, in 1803. With that 
city his name and ministry are thoroughly identi- 
fied, and for a period of fifty years, up till his death 



252 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

in 1853, he was one of the foremost citizens and 
one of the ablest preachers in the western capital 
of Scotland. He was in his last decade before I 
had the privilege of looking on his face or listen- 
ing to his words, and much of the vigor of his 
earlier days had gone, but there were still the calm 
dignity, the clear style, the logical cogency, the ju- 
dicial candor, and the acute analytical power for 
which all through life he was remarkable. He had 
never much of the impassioned, and rarely became 
animated or intense, but his reading was exqui- 
sitely beautiful, and it was a delight to hear him 
preach. 

It was his lot throughout his public life to ap- 
pear very frequently as a controversialist. He did 
good service in that way by his writings on the So- 
cinian, the Baptist, the Voluntary, and other discus- 
sions of his day, and one of the latest works which 
came from his pen was a vindication of Congrega- 
tionalism. His contest was never so much for vic- 
tory as for truth, and his spirit was always that 
of charity. He never reasoned disingenuously, or 
sought to make an argument carry more weight 
than it could honestly bear. He never mistook a 
bad name for good argument. He never imputed 



THE PULPITS OF THE DISSENTING CHURCHES. 253 

unworthy motives to his antagonists, and he took 
good care always to put their case as accurately and 
as strongly as it could be stated. He was emphat- 
ically a Christian gentleman, and though often 
sorely provoked, he never allowed his temper to af- 
fect his pen The result was that, without giving 
unnecessary pain to his adversaries, his writings 
were all the more powerful with the public jury to 
whom they were addressed ; and often, in times of 
strife and debate, when the odium theologicum is 
running high, I have wished that the combatants 
on both sides had come under the influence of 
Wardlaw in these respects. 

His pulpit method is thus described by his biog- 
rapher : " It was his habit in the early period of his 
ministry to deliver his discourses from memory af- 
ter he had written them fully and carefully out ; or 
from meditation, after having put down in writing 
an outline of what he meant to say, the latter being 
by much the more frequent plan with him. Dis- 
courses so delivered were probably wanting in that 
minute accuracy and grace of expression which 
characterized his later compositions after he adopt- 
ed the plan of reading whatever he uttered from 
the pulpit ; but I have heard those who were in the 



254 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

habit of listening to him at this time express their 
regret at the absence from his later discourses of 
that pungency and animation which his earlier dis- 
courses seldom wanted."* 36. One worthy member of 
his congregation said that for long after he began 
to "use the paper" he always felt ready to cry out 
the words of the Lord regarding Lazarus — "Loose 
him and let him go." But when he adopted the 
manuscript, the care which he took to become a 
good reader, and the advantage which he possessed 
in a naturally musical voice and carefully modu- 
lated enunciation, tended to overcome prejudice, 
and made his reading ultimately perhaps more ac- 
ceptable than his free speech had been. In the 
forenoon service he generally gave himself to expo- 
sition, and his works on the Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, 
the Prophecies of Zechariah, the Epistle to the Ro- 
mans, and the Epistle of James, are the evidences 
of his diligence and ability in that particular de- 
partment. There was little of what could be term- 
ed genius about him, but he had a strength and 
beauty of his own. His strength lay in the critical 
and ratiocinative faculties, and his beauty came 

* " Life of Wardlaw," p. 77. W. L. Alexander, D.D., LL.D. 



THE PULPITS OF THE DISSENTING CHURCHES. 255 

from bis exact and elegant taste. His sense of the 
becoming was rarely, if ever, at fault, and bis appre- 
ciation of the beautiful, whether in nature or senti- 
ment, was quick and just. He bad also a playful 
wit, but that be kept rigidly out of the pulpit, 
reserving it entirely for moments of social inter- 
course, and even then never allowing it to trespass 
beyond the limits of propriety. His biography, by 
Dr. Alexander, is one of the most instructive books 
of its class, combining in itself almost a course of 
theology and a treatise on homiletics. It gives not 
only the outline of Dr. Wardlaw's works, but also 
Dr. Alexander's criticisms on them, so that we have 
the best of both men on the subjects treated. The 
course thus followed by Dr. Alexander was severe- 
ly commented on by many, but the spirit in which 
bis criticisms w r ere made, and the value of the criti- 
cisms themselves, give a permanent importance to 
the book, which I very earnestly commend to your 
attention. 

But we must say a few emphatic words concern- 
ing William Lindsay Alexander himself. Born 
at Leith, on the 24th of August, 1808, he was edu- 
cated at schools there and in East Linton, and after 
three years at the University of Edinburgh he went 



256 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

for two years to the University of St. Andrews, 
where he came under the influence of Dr. Chalmers, 
for whom, throughout his life, he cherished the 
greatest affection and admiration. After a brief at- 
tendance at the theological academy of the Con- 
gregationalists, in Glasgow, he was called to the 
Classical Tutorship of the Independent College, 
Blackburn, England. From this, with a brief inter- 
val, during which he made trial of his preaching 
gifts in sundry places, he passed to Liverpool, where 
for a year and a half he supplied the pulpit of New- 
ington Chapel. His ministry in Edinburgh began 
on January 1, 1835, and there, first in the Argyle 
Square Chapel and afterwards in Augustine Church, 
which he was himself instrumental in erecting, and 
which he named after the Christian Father who of 
all others was held by him in highest veneration, 
he ministered till within a year of his death, in 1884. 
He was a ripe scholar, especially in Greek and He- 
brew; his attainments in the former enabling him 
to rank with the best Grecians of the day, and his 
eminence in the latter securing him a place in the 
Old Testament Company of the Westminster Re- 
visers. His works are numerous and weighty, and 
by his editorship of the best edition of Kitto's Cy- 



THE PULPITS OF THE DISSENTING CHURCHES. 257 

clopsediahe has laid all Bible students under heavy 
obligation. His industry was unflagging. He had 
no faith in pastoral visitation, and little aptitude 
for it, hence he left that to others; but he was dili- 
gent at his desk, and in the pulpit he always fed his 
people with the finest of the wheat. I recall him 
as lie was in those days, now nearly forty years ago, 
when, during my seminary course, I was regularly 
to be found in his morning audience. He preached 
then in the old Argyle Chapel, to a congregation 
more remarkable for weight of character than for 
numbers. As he took his place in the pulpit, one 
could not but be struck with the breadth and lofti- 
ness of his lordly brow and the firm expression of 
his mobile mouth. As he looked abroad upon his 
audience you marked also the keen searching glance 
of his eyes ; but when he began the service, you 
forgot everything else in the devotional absorption 
into which, w T hether you would or not, you were 
withdrawn by him. His prayers lifted the very 
petitions which you were wishing to present, and 
there was no misgiving in the "Amen " with which 
you responded. His sermons were generally on 
great subjects. One, I remember with a vivid dis- 
tinctness, was on the Eternity of God ; another, 



258 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

from the text, " Be sure your sin will find you out," 
burned indelibly into me the difference between the 
expressions " Your sin will be found out " and " Your 
sin will find out you." They were all remarkable 
for the weight of their thought, the clearness of their 
style, and the earnestness of their appeal. His pa- 
thos was a power. It never unmanned him, but it 
always affected you. And sometimes when he was 
roused, his indignant scorn of wrong-doing, or his 
withering sarcasm in the exposure of some specious 
infidel objection, was positively tremendous.* In 

* His sarcastic humor came out in these days very freely, 
and some very droll instances of it are related by his biog- 
rapher in the admirable memoir recently issued. I give two 
others that were current among the students of my genera- 
tion. One morning an unusual number of pulpit notices had 
been sent to him from all quarters to be read at the public 
service. The thing had become a nuisance, and he wished to 
rebuke it. So, arranging the pile in such a manner as to make 
his act effective, he lifted them up, and let them fall in a long, 
fluttering series to his feet, saying the while, in his most with- 
ering style, "Do they mean to turn this pulpit — such as it is — 
into a column of the North British Advertiser V The manner 
in which he alluded to the pulpit, which he used jokingly to 
call "the horse-box," and which was ugly enough in all con- 
science, was inimitably grotesque. He was not often troubled 
with a drowsy audience, but he could not tolerate a deliberate 
employment of the pew as a sleeping-place. One day, just as 
he was giving out his text, he saw a man in the front seat of 
the side gallery, almost within reach of him, carefully fold his 



THE PULPITS OF THE DISSENTING CHURCHES. 259 

his later days some of these qualities were absent, 
and the mellowness of experience came in their 
stead to give a new charm to his addresses. I nev- 
er heard him in a regular series of expositions 
through any one book, but indeed the groundwork of 
every sermon he preached was exposition ; for the 
first thing he always did was to show the meaning 
of his text, and lift his subject naturally out of it. 
He read his sermons from manuscript, but such 
was the hold he took of you from the first that 
you forgot in a few moments all about the "pa- 
per." Often, in the heat and intensity of his men- 
tal action, the discourse "boiled over" into extem- 
pore speech, and then you might expect some terse 
and pungent sayings. Sometimes, too, after he had 
shut the book, he lingered to say a few tender 
words or to make a last solemn appeal, beautiful in 
the calmness of its love, and bearing the same re- 
arms upon the book-board and lay his head upon them, as if 
settling himself for a snooze. He could not let such an act pass 
unnoticed, and the way in which he reproved it was character- 
istic. He stood still and silent for what seemed quite a while, 
until the culprit, wondering what the matter was, raised his 
head a few inches and looked up. This was all the doctor 
was waiting for, and gracefully bowing to the offender, he 
said, ' ' Good- night, my friend." Needless to say there was no 
sleep for him throughout that service. 



260 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

lation to the discourse as the motion of a vessel, af- 
ter the engines have ceased their action, does to its 
propulsion by the screw. He was like an extra 
professor to me while I was at the United Presby- 
terian Seminary, and not unfrequently the great 
majority of my fellow-students were present in his 
congregation. In the brilliant galaxy of preachers 
who made Edinburgh famous during the fifth and 
sixth decades of this century he had a place dis- 
tinctively his own, and they who heard his dis- 
courses wondered no less at their excellence than at 
the number and ability of his published works. 

Reverting now to the Established Church since 
the date of the Disruption, I have room here for 
but the briefest mention of Norman Macleod. Af- 
ter the departure of the Free Churchmen there was 
for a time a great scarcity of men of mark in the 
Establishment; and as one of its leaders of to-day 
has remarked, " third-rate men were in several in- 
stances brought from the obscurity to which they 
were born, and in which they should have been al- 
lowed to die, to occupy prominent pulpits," * so 

* "Scottish Divines, " Third Series, p. 393. 



THE PULPITS OF THE DISSENTING CHURCHES. 261 

that perhaps it was easier for one possessed of 
ability to find his way to the front than in other 
circumstances it might have been. But in any cir- 
cumstances Gorman Macleod would have become 
a leader. Born at Campbelton in 1812, he was 
educated mainly at the University of Glasgow, but 
went for two years in his theological course to Ed- 
inburgh, that he might enjoy the prelections of 
Chalmers. He was ordained to the ministry in Lou- 
doun, Ayrshire, in 1838, was transferred to Dalkeith 
in 1843, and thence to the Barony parish, Glasgow, 
in 1851, where he labored till his death, in 1S72. 
In his early Loudoun days his form and features 
were familiar to me. I was then a boy at the Kil- 
marnock Academj^, and he was one of the most pop- 
ular of the neighboring clergy who used to come to 
its annual examinations, for he was sure to request 
before he left that a special holiday should be given 
us because of the good appearance we had made. 
He was always an assistant at the communion in 
the parish church, and I have still a distinct recol- 
lection of hearing and enjoying his evening ser- 
mons on such occasions. His parish was only a 
few miles from my home, and the report of his 
successful effort to fill his church at a special even- 



262 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

ing service with the people in their working garb, 
was told with a kind of wonderment, as something 
utterly unheard of before, by the farmers of the 
district when they came to market. He was then 
distinctly evangelical in his teachings, and whatever 
may be said of his opinions at a later day, he never 
lost the fervor of spirit by which, at that time, he 
was characterized. 

But it was during his Barony pastorate that he 
came most prominently into view; and in that, 
splendid as in many other respects it was, nothing 
was so great as his work among the laboring classes, 
whom, after the plan which he had followed in 
Loudoun, he gathered into the house of God on the 
evening of the first day of the week in large num- 
bers, and in their " white jackets," and multitudes 
of whom were admitted by him, after careful ex- 
amination, to the membership of his church. He 
was a great, full-rounded, whole-souled man, and his 
thorough humanness was the substratum of his pow- 
er. Add to that his joyous love of nature, his Cel- 
tic temperament, with its poetic susceptibility and 
its occasional weird out-flashings of mystic might, 
his devotional fervor, which, to the surprise of so 
many — though Dr. Flint says it was no surprise 



THE PULPITS OF THE DISSENTING CHURCHES. 263 

to him — came out so fully in his diary, his deep 
well of tender sympathy with suffering, of which 
his " wee Davie " may be taken as a specimen, and 
his intense desire to do good to all with whom he 
came into contact, and you have the qualities which 
were most distinctive in his character. The hack- 
neyed words of Terence, "Homo sum; humanum 
nil a me alienum puto," were exactly appropriate to 
him, and he could make himself equally at home 
in the palace of the Queen and in the workshop 
of a Newmilns weaver. In private he had a 
great fund of humor, some of it even rollicking 
in its heartiness, and a great wealth of anecdote. 
And in the pulpit, when he was great he was great 
indeed. But he was like all men of his tempera- 
ment, unequal in his discourses. When he was "in 
full flood," however, he carried all before him.* 



* He could be also provokingly beneath himself. The last 
time I heard him he " expatiated " (to use Chalmers's word) over 
three chapters in the latter part of the book of Genesis, and the 
manner in which he went from paragraph to paragraph remind- 
ed me of the reason given by an old pulpit worthy for prefer- 
ring to expound a long passage of Scripture, to the effect that 
"when he was persecuted in one verse he could flee to anoth- 
er. " Norman, as he was always affectionately and familiarly 
called, must have undergone a good deal of such "persecution " 
that morning, for he did a good deal of such "fleeing." But 



264 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

When he was in his prime, I rather think that he 
wrote his discourses fully out, and either delivered 
from memory or read from the manuscript, as suit- 
ed him best on the occasion. But in his later days, 
while giving much premeditation to his sermon, he 
left himself free to take the language which came 
to him at the moment, so that he combined " the 
self-control of the prepared discourse with the di- 
rectness of extemporaneous effort," and the address 
approached the conversational, which, in the estima- 
tion of some — though I confess that I am not one 
of them — is the true ideal of a sermon. Theologi- 
cally he slipped from his moorings considerably, so 
that latterly he might be ranked with the English 
Broad Churchmen. He adopted the views of Mac- 
leod Campbell on the Atonement, those of Arnold 
on the Church, and, unless I have mistaken his 
meaning in some of his letters, those of the Besto- 
rationists on eschatology. How he reconciled the 
last of these with his acceptance of the Westmin- 
ster Confession I am unable to say, and I fear that 

perhaps the fault was my own. I should have taken the advice 
of the " candid friend " in the church porch, who, when I asked 
if Dr. Macleod was to preach that morning, made reply, "Ay, 
sir, but if I was you I wudna gang in noo, he's aye far best in 
the efternun." 



THE PULPITS OF THE DISSENTING CHURCHES. 265 

his influence has had much to do with the strength- 
ening of that current which has set in towards the 
opinions advocated by some of the contributors to 
the volume of Scotch sermons which was published 
a few years ago. Undeniably, he never could have 
advocated such rationalistic doctrines as are to be 
found in one or two of these discourses, but his 
views on the significance of subscription to a creed 
may have encouraged their authors to put them 
forward. 

In the Free Church, just subsequent to the Dis- 
ruption, there was a group of remarkable men, who 
may be called the lieutenants of Chalmers, to at 
least two of whom, before we conclude, we must di- 
rect your attention. These two are Eobert Smith 
Candlish and Thomas Guthrie. Candlish was 
born in Edinburgh in 1803, educated at the Uni- 
versity of Glasgow, and after some years spent as 
an assistant, first in Glasgow and latterly in Bonhill, 
he was ordained to the ministry of St. George's, Ed- 
inburgh, in 1834, where, first in the Established and 
afterwards in the Free Church, he labored till his 
death, in 1873. He was one of the great debaters 

in the Disruption controversy, His speeches were 
12 



266 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

like trumpet-calls for the mustering of the hosts to 
battle, and "one blast upon his bugle -horn was 
worth ten thousand men." But it is mainly as a 
preacher that we must speak of him here. In per- 
sonal appearance he was peculiar. I question if any 
one ever saw him for the first time without being 
tempted to smile. His body was diminutive, but 
what it lacked appeared to have been given to the 
head, which for size would not have sat amiss upon 
the shoulders of a giant. His hair hung all around 
it in tangled luxuriance, sometimes almost like a 
mop. His mouth was large, with the under jaw 
slightly protuberant. His eyes were restless and 
flashing, and his forehead full. He went up the 
pulpit stair with a hurried step, and running his 
fingers through his hair, he gave out the psalm in a 
defiant tone, as if he meant to let some one know 
that he would not be put down. "When he came to 
the sermon, he indulged unconsciously in all man- 
ner of convulsive movements, twisting and writh- 
ing like one in agony. He clutched at his gown, 
he took hold of the Bible as if he would lift it and 
throw it at his audience, he grasped the pulpit like 
one who feared he was about to fall. But all this 
while he had been opening up his text in a manner 



THE PULPITS OF THE DISSENTING CHURCHES. 267 

so clear, so comprehensive, so suggestive, that, as he 
proceeded, you forgot his eccentricities of manner, 
and felt only the power of his words. His forte 
was in exposition and practical appeal, and he was 
never so great as when he was engaged in the analy- 
sis of some Scripture . character, and the enforce- 
ment of the lessons which it conveyed to modern 
times. Sometimes he was exceedingly subtle, and 
it was difficult to follow him, but in general the 
lines of his thought w r ere well defined, so that while 
his discourses were an intellectual treat to the most 
refined, they were also enjoyed by the plainest and 
least educated of the audience. He had none of 
the pictorial or illustrative power of Guthrie, but 
his appeals had a more searching character and a 
more incisive edge. He grappled at once with the 
intellect and the conscience, and made every one 
feel that he had to do with God. Listening to him 
at such a time was like being subjected to a sort of 
spiritual vivisection. Like Chalmers, he read his 
discourses, even to slavishness ; but, as in the case 
of Chalmers, it was " fell reading." Sometimes he 
preached without a manuscript, but on such occa- 
sions he was very unequal, and in later years it was 
but rarely that he attempted that manner of ad- 



268 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT, 

dress. He was an instance of a man pushing his 
way into the very front of pulpit orators, in spite 
many positive blemishes, by the pure force of his 
intellectual pre-eminence, spiritual insight, and im- 
passioned fervor, and there were not wanting many 
imitators who thought that they had clothed them- 
selves in the strength of their model when they 
had succeeded only in putting on one of his weak- 
nesses. 

Thomas Guthrie was not, like Candlish, a great 
debater and ecclesiastical statesman, but he was the 
popular orator, carrying all before him, not so much 
by the power of logic as by the appositeness of his 
illustrations, the force of his humor, and the depth 
of his pathos. 

He was born at Brechin in 1803, and educated 
first at the schools of his native place, and after- 
wards at the University of Edinburgh. He was 
licensed to preach in 1825, but being disappointed 
in obtaining a parish, he went to Paris, where he 
studied medicine for a time. On his return to his 
native place he conducted a Bank Agency for two 
years, and at length, in 1830, he was ordained to 
the pastorate of Arbirlot. Thence he was trans- 
lated to the collegiate charge of New Greyfriars, 



THE PULPITS OF THE DISSENTING CHURCHES. 269 

in Edinburgh, in 1837; and from that he was trans- 
ferred to the parish of St. John's, in the same city, 
in 1840. After the Disruption, he became minister 
of Free St. John's, which charge he held till 1864, 
when he became pastor emeritus. During the last 
years of his life he was editor of the Sunday Mag- 
azine, in the pages of which most of his works 
first appeared, and the supervision of which was 
his chief labor till his death, in 1873. 

His pastorate of St. John's took him down into 
the dens of the Cowgate, and stirred him up to do 
his utmost for the elevation of the degraded people 
who lived in them. Tims began his efforts for 
Ragged Schools. In the same line, he took up a 
work like that of Chalmers in the West Port, and 
was instrumental in rearing more than one church 
among the poor. It was in connection with such 
evangelistic work that his sermons on " The City, 
its Sins and Sorrows," were first preached and pub- 
lished, and full details of the different departments 
of these enterprises will be found in the appendix 
to the early editions of these discourses. His en- 
ergy as a philanthropist was equalled only by his 
earnestness in the pulpit. 

As a preacher, he did not so much belong to any 



270 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

class as he constituted a whole class by himself. 
Since his appearance he has had many imitators, 
but when he rose to fame lie was, in Great Britain 
at least, the only one of his kind. He was not an 
expository preacher, neither could he be called 
dogmatic or doctrinal. He did not deal very liber- 
ally either in what has been termed the hortatory 
method. But he was what Dr. McCosh has called 
him, " the pictorial preacher of his age." 

In his earlier years he gave much attention to 
elocution. He believed that "the manner is to 
the matter as the powder is to the ball ;" and he 
tells ns that during his student life in Edinburgh 
" he attended elocution classes, winter after winter, 
walking across half the city and more, fair night 
and foul, and not getting back to his lodgings till 
about half-past ten. There he learned to find out 
and correct many acquired and more or less awk- 
ward defects in gesture — to be, in fact, natural ; to 
acquire a command over his voice so as to suit its 
force and emphasis to the sense, and to modulate it 
so as to express the feelings, whether of surprise, or 
grief, or indignation, or pity." The wisdom of this 
course at that particular stage of his history was 
great. If he had deferred his lessons in elocution 



THE PULPITS OF THE DISSENTING CHURCHES. 271 

until after lie had begun to preacli he would have 
become stilted, self-conscious, and unnatural. But 
taking them just then, they passed into and became 
part of himself, so that he acted upon them un- 
consciously and, as it were, automatically, and he 
thought no more about them when he was in the 
act of speaking than a practised writer does about 
spelling when lie is in the heat of composition. If 
we wished to spoil a minister who is in actual work, 
we would send him to learn elocution; but if we 
wished to prepare a youth for doing effective work 
in the pulpit, we would take care that while he is as 
yet, so to say, in the gristle, with his habits unset, 
he should be sent to a wise teacher to learn how to 
speak. 

Dr. Guthrie's sermons were generally fully writ- 
ten out.* He set himself " to use the simplest and 
plainest terms, avoiding anything vulgar, but al- 
ways, where possible, employing the Saxon tongue. 
He spared no pains, nor toil, nor time in making his 



* I have said generally, for I was informed recently by Dr. 
McCosh that he frequently, in the heat of utterance, put in pas- 
sages which were not in the manuscript. But how he was able 
to resume his prepared discourse at the point at which he broke 
away to make such a digression is to me a mystery. 



272 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

descriptions graphic, his statements lucid, and his 
appeals pathetic." For years after his settlement 
in Edinburgh he spent three hours — those between 
six and nine in the morning— every day in rumi- 
nating on, digesting, and doing the utmost on his 
sermon. He wrote his discourse with his audience 
in his imagination before him. He even spoke 
aloud the words which he w r as inditing ; thus, as it 
were, writing to his own dictation. After the ser- 
mon was finished he spent hours in correcting it, 
having left in later years for that purpose a blank 
page opposite every written one. His corrections 
consisted, as he has told us, in "cutting out dry 
bits, giving point to dull ones, making clear any 
obscurity, and narrative parts more graphic ; throw- 
ing more pathos into appeals, and copying God in 
his works by adding the ornamental to the "useful." 
The substance of the sermons, as we have said, was 
mainly pictorial. In his early preaching days at 
Arbirlot he had a young people's class, which as- 
sembled on the Sabbath evenings, and part of the 
exercise of the pupils was to give an account of the 
discourse which they had heard in the earlier part 
of the day. From the answers of the young peo- 
ple he discovered that they always remembered the 



THE PULPITS OF THE DISSENTING CHURCHES. 273 

Illustrations best, and that determined him to give 
more attention to what he calls " the likes " in his 
discourses. It is noteworthy here that illustration 
was not originally his forte, but was acquired by 
steady, earnest, and persistent effort. Indeed, he 
went so far with it that at length the sermons came 
to be almost all illustration together. 

And here is the place where the critic finds him 
most vulnerable. He overdid the pictorial. Yery 
often the thing which he wanted to illustrate was 
forgotten in the wondrous beauty of his description 
of the illustration. In this respect there was a 
wide difference between him and his friend Will- 
iam Arnot,* greatly to the advantage of the latter. 
Guthrie elaborated the illustration until it stood 
out a perfect word-painting before the eyes of the 



* It is a mortification to me that I had to omit, owing to the 
time at my command for the delivery of these lectures, any de- 
tailed reference to Mr. Arnot. He was a real genius. A rough 
diamond, but still a diamond. A clear head, a warm heart, 
an awkward yet strangely expressive manner, a fine fancy, 
strong common-sense, and pawkie humor were his outstanding 
peculiarities. He was the most Scotch of Scotchmen, but of 
him, too, it was true that he was best on the platform. The 
raciness and appropriateness of his anecdotes were equal to 
those of Guthrie. The one was all nature, the other's art had 
become natural. 

12* 



274 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

people ; Arnot flashed his simile for but a brief 
moment before the hearer, but the effect was to 
light up the whole subject, and that was all of which 
the audience was conscious. Neither of them was 
master of that use of the metaphor which was so 
characteristic of Bushnell, and which packs an illus- 
tration into a single word. That may sometimes 
be too condensed for effectiveness ; but Guthrie, on 
the other hand, was often too diffuse for the high- 
est power. Besides, a sermon that is all illustration 
together cannot but be defective in instruction. In 
Guthrie's case it was fortunate that he had Dr. 
Hanna so long for a colleague, for that which was 
lacking in the one was plentifully supplied by the 
other, and the two were the "complements " of each 
other. Flowers are good, but we like a little fruit 
as well ; and though it be true, as Sir William 
Hamilton said, that Guthrie's illustrations had the 
force of logic which had only one step between the 
premise and the conclusion, yet a discourse that is 
all illustration will soon wither in the memory, and 
become as neglected as one of last week's bouquets. 
In his delivery Dr. Guthrie preached memorite7\ 
The " committing " of his discourses cost him little 
trouble. Even in his early days he wrote only one 



THE PULPITS OF THE DISSENTING CHURCHES. 275 

a week, and in some later years he was very far 
from accomplishing that ; but his morning hours 
were abundantly sufficient to fix that in his mind, 
and "use so bred the habit in him" that latterly 
his memory retained his sermon almost without 
any effort of memorizing, so that when he was 
speaking he had nothing of the appearance of one 
who was remembering, but all the freedom, without 
any of the hesitancy or anxiety, of an extempore 
speaker. He was calm, self-possessed, deliberate, 
but rarely, if ever, impassioned. Intensely dra- 
matic, he reproduced in action that which he was 
describing, often with such effect as to make the 
people forget that he was only describing. There 
is a passage in "the Gospel in Ezekiel" descrip- 
tive of the battle between David and Goliath, and 
one who heard it delivered told me that w 7 hen the 
speaker launched the stone from the stripling's 
sling every one seated in the gallery opposite the 
pulpit dodged his head to elude the missile! 

It was a remarkable audience that regularly wor- 
shipped in St. John's Free Church, Edinburgh, 
when Guthrie was in his power. There might have 
been seen, with his profuse whiskers, shaggy head, 
and plaided shoulders, Hugh Miller, the Cromarty 



276 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

stone-mason, who became one of the foremost jour- 
nalists and geologists of his day. Not far away 
was seated Dr. James Y. Simpson, the discoverer 
of chloroform, with his leonine face lighted up 
with interest as his eyes were fixed intently on 
the preacher. There, too, sometimes, was the rest- 
less, erratic Blackie, Professor of Greek in the Uni- 
versity, who came, as he said, to hear the most Ho- 
meric descriptions which this age has ever listened 
to. There, also, not seldom, right in front of the 
pulpit, was Lord Cockburn, the friend of Jeffrey 
and the favorite of all Scotland, whose delight it 
was to "have a greet wi' Guthrie." While he 
was able, too, the keen metaphysician, Sir "William 
Hamilton, was occasionally seen within these home- 
ly walls; and w r eek by week the passages were 
thronged with strangers from all quarters and 
from many lands, who timed their visits to the 
metropolis of Scotland so that they might be there 
on the Sabbath and "hear Guthrie." 

What the results of such preaching were spirit- 
ually w r e are not able to say. We read little in the 
autobiography and memoir of conversions or growth 
in Christian character among the people that waited 
on his ministrations. This may, however, be large- 



THE PULPITS OF THE DISSENTING CHURCHES. 277 

ly owing to Scottish reticence on such subjects, and 
must not be taken as indicating that effects of that 
sort were few. But whatever else he secured, he 
gained and held the hearing of the people ; and if 
they were so ready to follow him, as we know they 
were, in his philanthropic schemes, we may well 
believe that many were led by him to choose " the 
good part that could not be taken from them." 

But now our task is done, and I sum up my hom- 
iletic lessons for this whole review in two advices. 

First, be youeselves. Pulpit efficiency is not a 
matter of method. There have been great preach- 
ers in all methods, with the paper and without it, 
extempore and memoriter, expository and topical. 
The efficiency is not in the method, but in the man. 
As one has said, that which all great preachers have 
in common to make them great preachers " is, along 
with intellect, force of character, an energetic nat- 
ure, — will. A great preacher is not a mere artist, 
and not a feeble suppliant ; he is a conquering soul, 
a monarch, a born ruler of mankind. He wills, and 
men bow." * Thus pulpit efficiency is only one of 

* "Lectures on the History of Preaching," p. 119. John A. 
Eroadus, D.D. 



278 THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. 

the forms of the efflorescence of character. Keep 
that in mind, and it will save you from the artifi- 
ciality of imitation, while it will lead you to see 
that you will best cultivate homiletics through at- 
tention to character. Be yourselves, but make the 
best of yourselves, that you may be your highest 
selves. 

And while you are thus careful to be yourselves, 
do not preach yourselyes. Preach Christ. Be- 
ware of hiding Him behind yourselves; rather hide 
yourselves behind Him ; and while your audience 
hear the voice, let them "see no man but Jesus 
only." Do not make the sermon an end : use it 
only as a means ; and let your end be, not the gath- 
ering of a multitude, nor the making of a name for 
yourselves, but the saving of them that hear you, 
and then you will not lack success. 

It has been a joy to me to come once more thus 
closely into fellowship with you and your teachers, 
but the most joyful thing of all is that now my 
work is done. Kay, that is not the most joyful 
thing, after all ; for it will be the highest of all 
joy to me to know that I have done anything, how- 
ever small, to quicken your enthusiasm for that no- 
ble work to which you have given yourselves, or that 



THE PULPITS OF THE DISSENTING CHURCHES. 279 

I have laid up in you some memories which you 
can recall when haply he who has addressed you 
has passed within the veil to the companionship of 
those of whom he has been honored to speak in 
the midst of you. 



INDEX. 



Alexander, Rev. W. L., D.D., LL.D., quoted from or re 
f erred to, 33, 37, 254; biography of Dr. Wardlaw by, char 
aeterized, 255; characteristics of, as a preacher, 255-260. 

Anderson, Rev. William, LL.D., 31; as a preacher, 248-250. 

Anne, Queen, patronage enactment under, 23. 

Anti-burghers, the, 28. 

Anti-papal period of Scottish Church History, 15. 

Anti-patronage period of Scottish Church History, 21-26. 

Anti-prelatic period of Scottish Church History, 16-23. 

Arnot, Rev. William, 273. 

Baptist churches in Scotland, 37. 
Baxter, Richard, on Rutherfurd's Letters, 91. 
Bayne, Dr. Peter, quoted from, 190. 
Binning, Hugh, referred to, 128. 
Blackie, Professor, 276. 
Blaikie, Rev. Dr. W. G., quoted, 124, 125. 
Blair, Dr. Hugh, 26, 154-158. 
Blair, Rev. Robert, 95. 
Boston, Rev. Thomas, 160-163. 
Boston, Rev. Thomas, Jr., 30. 
Breda, declaration of Charles the Second at, 117. 
Brown, Rev. John, of Haddington, 237. 
Brown, Rev. John Whitburn, 237. 

Brown, Rev. John, D.D., 31; remarks of, on Leighton, 131; on 
Maclaurin, 168; characteristics of, as a preacher, 236, 



282 INDEX. 

Brown, John, M.D., description of Chalmers by, 225-229; re- 
ferred to, 237, 239. 
Buchanan, Rev. Dr. Eobert, 26. 
Burghers, the, 28. 

Burnet, Bishop, quoted from, 119, 128. 
Burns, Robert, 10, 13, 14, 107. 

Caird, Rev. Principal, 69. 

Cairns, Rev. Principal, 69. 

Cameron, Richard, 21, 70, 139; sermon by, 141. 

Cameronians, the, 27, 230. 

Campbell, Sir Hugh, quoted, 103. 

Candlish, Rev. Dr. R, S., 26, 265-268. 

Cargil, Donald, 26. 

Carlyle, Rev. Dr. Alexander, 26, 159. 

Carlyle, Thomas, 41, 211, 221. 

Caution, Scottish, 12. 

Cecil, Richard, on Rutherfurd's Letters, 91. 

Chalmers, Rev. Dr. Thomas, 25, 69, 194-229 ; astronomical dis- 
courses of, 207; influence of, as a theological professor, 226;. 
work of, in the West Port, 217; characteristics of, 220-225. 

Characteristics of the Scottish people, 9-14. 

Charles the First, 17, 19, 82, 114. 

Charles the Second, 20, 82, 114, 119. 

Clarendon, Lord, on Alexander Henderson, 85. 

Cockburn, Lord, 58, 276. 

Coleridge on Leighton's Calvinism, 124. 

Congregationalism, Scottish, origin of, 32. 

Conventicles, open-air, description of, 137. 

Covenant, the National, 19, 84. 

Covenant, the Solemn League and, 19, 113, 114. 

Cromwell, Oliver, 19, 20, 82, 92. 

Cunningham, Rev. Dr. John, referred to, 78. 

Curriculum of Scottish students for the ministry, 39. 

Dick, Rev. John, D.D., 31, 234. 



INDEX. 283 

Dickson, Rev. David, 95, 97-104; scholarship and education of, 

111. 
Disruption of Scottish Church, 26. 
Dourness, Scottish, 12. 

Eadie, Rev. John, D.D., LL.D., quoted from, 91, 168; charac- 
teristics of, 241-244. 

Education of early Scottish ministers, 111. 

Edwards, Jonathan, Scottish correspondents of, 170, 173; influ- 
ence of, on Chalmers, 195. 

Erskine, Rev. Ebenezer, 27, 31, 163-167. 

Erskine, Rev. Dr. John, 26, 172; description of, by Sir Walter 
Scott, 174. 

Erskine, Rev. Ralph, 31, 163-167, 177. 

Evangelical Union, the, 38. 

Evangelicals, the, some characteristics of, 176; lessons from, 
179, 180. 

Fairfowl, Archbishop, 114, 115. 

Ferguson, Alexander, Lieutenant-colonel, quoted, 121. 

Finlayson, James, D.D., quoted, 154, 156. 

Fleming's "Fulfilling of the Scriptures," quoted from, 101, 108. 

Foster, John, referred to, 177. 

Free Church of Scotland, the, 26. 

Fuller, Andrew, on Chalmers, 224. 

Geddes, Jenny, 18, 19, 81. 

Gillespie, George, 19. 

Gillespie, Thomas, 29. 

Glasgow Act, the, 116. 

Grahame's, James, " The Sabbath," quoted from, 146. 

Grosart, Rev. Dr. A. B., quoted, 91, 96. 

Guthrie, Rev. Dr. Thomas, 26, 265, 268-277. 

Hadow, Principal, 162. 
Haldane, James A., 33, 36. 



284 INDEX. 

Haldane, Eobert, 33, 36. 

Hall, Eobert, criticism of, on Chalmers, 223. 

Hamilton, Bishop, 114. 

Hamilton, Patrick, 15. 

Hamilton, Sir William, 274, 276. 

Hampden, John, 19. 

Hanna, Kev. Dr. "William, Life of Chalmers by, quoted from, 

201-205, 208, 209, 219; colleague of Guthrie, 274. 
Henderson, Rev. Alexander, 19, 70, 72, 78-88; sermons of, 82; 

prayers of, 84. 
Hetherington's " History of the Church of Scotland," quoted 

from, 102, 107. 
Homiletic lessons, 277, 278. 
Hoppin, Rev. Professor, 206. 
Hume, David, 35, 159, 191. 

Independence a characteristic of Scotchmen, 10. 
Innes, Mr. Taylor, quoted, 93. 
Intensity a characteristic of Scotchmen, 11. 
Irving, Rev. Edward, 210, 213. 

James the Sixth, 17, 74, 114. 
Jeffrey, Lord, 58, 222. 

Keble, John, quoted, 158. 

Ker, Rev. John, D.D., 32. 

Kilmany, Chalmers's address on leaving, 201-205. 

"Kilmarnock, History of," by A. McKay, referred to, 135. 

King, Rev. David, LL.D., characteristics of, as a preacher, 244- 
246. 

Knox, John, 15, 45-71 ; influence of, on Scottish pulpit, 66-71 ; 
characteristics of, as a preacher, 52 - 66 ; description of, by 
James Melville, 61; Witherspoon a descendant of, 171. 

Laud, Archbishop, 18, 19. 
Lawson, Rev. Dr. George, 31, 237. 



INDEX. 285 

Leigbton, Archbishop, 21, 72, 114, 119-133. 
Literary services of the Moderates to Scotland, 190. 
Livingstone, Rev. John, 104-109; learning of, 105, 111. 
Lockhart's, J. G-., "Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk " quoted 
from or referred to, 107, 182. 

Maclaubin, John, 26, 167-170. 

McCosh, Dr. James, quoted from or referred to, 24, 25, 166, 271. 

McCrie, Rev. Dr. Thomas (the elder), quoted from or referred 

to, 62, 74, 76, 162, 183; characteristics of, as a preacher, 233- 

236. 
McCrie, Rev. Dr. Thomas (the younger), quoted from or referred 

to, 79, 81, 95, 96. 
McLeod, Dr. Norman, characteristics of, as a preacher, 260, 265. 
Marrow of modern divinity, the, 161. 
Mason, Rev. John, 172. 
Melville, Andrew, 17, 70, 72-79, 111. 
Melville, James, description of John Knox by, 61 ; description 

of Glasgow University by, 73. 
Merchant, an English, description of Blair, Rutherfurd, and 

Dickson by, 95. 
Middleton, Earl of, 115. 

Miller, Hugh, quoted from or referred to, 173, 175, 235, 236, 276. 
Milton, John, quoted from or referred to, 93, 120. 
Missions, debate on, in 1796, 175. 

Moderates, the, 24, 36, 148-175; literary eminence of 190. 
Moncrief, Lord, 181. 
Moncrief, Sir Henry, 25, 172. 
Morison, Rev. Dr. James, 38, 244. 
Morton, Regent, 70, 76. 

National Covenant, the, 19; signing of, 84. 

" Old Mortality," ministerial characters in, 135, 136. 
Outed ministers, the, 116. 



286 INDEX. 

Paton, Captain John, 135. 

Patronage law enacted, 23 ; abolished, 26. 

Peden, Alexander, quoted from, 142. 

Peter's "Letters to his Kinsfolk," by J. G. Lockhart, quoted 

from or referred to, 107, 182. 
Poetic sense in Scotchmen, 12. 
Protesters and Eesolutioners, 111. 
Psalms, Scottish metrical version of the, 138. 
Pulpit and national character, connection between, 9. 

Rainy, Rev. Robert, D.D., quoted from, 150. 
Ramsay, Dean, 13. 
Reformed Presbyterian Church, 230. 
Relief Church, 29; characteristics of its preachers, 246-248. 
Renwick, James, 21. 
Resolutioners and Protesters, 111. 
Restoration of the Stuarts, 20. 
Reticence of the Scotch on religious subjects, 14. 
Revolution-settlement of Scottish Church, 21-23. 
Robertson, Dr. James, Errol, 41. 
Robertson, Rev. Principal, 26, 173, 191. 
Rough, John, 48. 
Russell, Rev. David, 251. 

Rutherfurd, Samuel, 19, 69, 72, 88-97; letters of, 90; works of, 
90; anecdote of Usher and, 109, 110. 

Scott, Sir Walter, quoted from, 173; referred to, 135. 

Scottish characteristics, 9-14. 

Scottish Ecclesiastical History, summary of, 15-42. 

Secession, first, from the Scottish Church, 27; second, 39; third, 

26. 
Shairp, Principal, 107. 
Sharpe, Archbishop, 114. 

Shotts, Kirk of, sermon by Livingstone at the, 106-108. 
Simpson, Patrick, quoted, 94. 
Simpson, Robert, D.D., 118, 139. 



INDEX. 287 

Simpson, Sir James Y., 27(i 

Smith, Rev. Walter C, D.D., quoted, 129. 

Society-men, the, 27; union of, with Free Church, 27, 230. 

Solemn League and Covenant, 19, 113, 114. 

Stanley, Dean, 78, 109, 146, 151. 

" Stewarton Sickness, The," 101. 

Stuarts, the, character of, 117. 

Symington, William, D.D., 129. 

Terrot, Bishop, anecdote of, 29. 

Thomson, Dr. Andrew, 25, 175; characteristics of, 180-185; 
great speech of, on immediate emancipation, 185 ; connec- 
tion of, with Chalmers, 198. 

" Tulchan" bishops, 16, 17. 

United Presbyterian Church, 30; curriculum of study in, 40; 
declaratory statement of, as to subscription to standards, 42. 
United Secession Church, 29. 
Usher, Archbishop, anecdote of, and Eutherfurd, 92, 109. 

Walker, Rev. James, D.D., quoted from or referred to, 90, 103, 

106. 
Walker, Rev. K L., quoted, 20, 215. 
Wardlaw, Rev. Ralph, D.D., 37; description of Chalmers by, 

208, 209 ; characteristics of, as a preacher, 251-255. 
Watson, Jean L., quoted from, 183, 184, 186. 
Welsh, John, 16. 

Westminster Assembly of Divines, 20, 82, 89. 
Wilks, Matthew, 34. 
Wishart, George, 15, 146. 
Witherspoon, John, D.D., 24, 171. 



THE END. 



